<html><head></head><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:Courier New, courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif;font-size:16px"><div class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_56472"><span class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58693">I think the gerenal preference for noun-adjective order is due to that adjective has a strong property of predicate.</span></div><div class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_56530"><span class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_56646">One interesting thing is why some major langueges such as English, Chinese, Russian (which is of rich
morphology and with rather free word order) take adjective-noun order?</span></div><div class=""><span class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_56646">Bingfu Lu<br></span></div><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_56648"></span><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58697" dir="ltr"><br></div><span class="" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_56648"></span> <div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58643" class="qtdSeparateBR"><br><br></div><div style="display: block;" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58650" class="yahoo_quoted"> <blockquote id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58649" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; margin-top: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> <div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58648" style="font-family: Courier New, courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> <div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58647" style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> <div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58646" dir="ltr"> <font id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58645" size="2" face="Arial"> <hr id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58644" size="1"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold;">From:</span></b> Matthew Dryer <dryer@buffalo.edu><br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org <br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Sunday, January 17, 2016 12:41 AM<br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [Lingtyp] Structural congruence as a dimension of language complexity/simplicity<br> </font> </div> <div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58702" class="y_msg_container"><br><div id="yiv6412384249"><div>
<div class="yiv6412384249moz-cite-prefix">
</div></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58701"><div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58700" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style="">For the record,
the Greenberg’s
suggestion that verb-initial languages tend to prefer
noun-adjective order more
than SVO or verb-final languages turns out to be an artifact of
Greenberg’s
small sample.<span style=""> </span>As I
showed in </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58738" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58733" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58735" style="font-family:Times;">Dryer, Matthew S. 1988<span style=""> </span>“Object-Verb Order and
Adjective-Noun Order:
Dispelling a Myth.” <i>Lingua</i> 74: 185-217.</span></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-family:Times;"> </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58703" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style="">and</div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58741" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58740" style="font-family:Times;">Dryer, Matthew S. 1992<span style=""> </span>“The Greenbergian Word
Order
Correlations.”<span style=""> </span><i>Language<span style=""> </span></i>68: 81-138.<i></i></span></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58705" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style="">there is no
relationship between
the order of adjective and noun and the order of object and
verb. There is a
preference for noun-adjective order among verb-initial
languages, but there is
the same preference among SVO and verb-final languages.</div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58713" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style="">Nor, as I showed
in my 1992
paper, is there any tendency for languages to exhibit consistent
ordering of
heads and dependents.</div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58724" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style=""> </div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58726" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal" style="">Matthew Dryer</div>
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</style><div class="yiv6412384249yqt1414747466" id="yiv6412384249yqt16256"><div>On 1/16/16 7:03 AM,
Alan Rumsey wrote:<br clear="none">
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<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">Dear All,</span></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US"> </span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58709" class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span id="yui_3_16_0_1_1453099553649_58708" style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">Francesca Merlan and I are currently
working on a paper on structural congruence as a dimension
of language complexity/simplicity. It is based on
</span><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">results from our longitudinal study of
children’s acquisition of two verb constructions in the
Papuan language </span><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">Ku Waru, namely, serial verb
constructions (SVC) and adjunct+verb constructions (AVC). We
show that children learn the AVC before the SVC, and argue
that this is determined in part by the greater congruence
between AVC and other basic aspects of Ku Waru syntax
including its strictly verb-final word order. This has got
us thinking about the general issue of structural congruence
as a dimension of language complexity.
</span><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">For example, long ago Greenberg demonstrated
that there is a very strong tendency in languages with VSO
word order for the adjective in NPs to follow the noun. This
is presumably because there is a kind of congruence between
the noun as the head of the NP and the verb as the head of
the clause – an insight which led to Nichols’ later very
useful typological distinction between head-marking and
dependent-marking grammar. Not all languages conform to
Greenburg’s generalization in this regard</span><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">.</span><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US"> But we would
argue that those that do are in that respect simpler than
those that don’t, because both the VSO template and the
noun-adjective one can be specified in terms of a more
general relationship between heads and dependents. So far in
our search through the recent literature on linguistic
complexity we haven’t come across any discussion of this
kind of congruence as a dimension of language
complexity/simplicity. Can any of you point us to any? Or to
other relevant data for a comparative consideration of this
issue?</span></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US"> </span></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">Alan Rumsey,</span></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US">Australian National
University</span><b><span style="font-family:Arial;" lang="EN-US"></span></b></div>
<div class="yiv6412384249MsoNormal"><span lang="FR"> </span></div>
</div>
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