Arabic-L:LING:Word Order and Generative Grammar

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 03 Jan 2008
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1) Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar
2) Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar

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1)
Date: 03 Jan 2008
From:Andrew T Freeman <andyf at u.washington.edu>
Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar

Oh --

  I cannot stay out of this.

  1) Suppose the order in the past/perfective tense is VSO.
      a) the question in my mind is: Do we count the subject markers as
          i) "morphology" and therefore part of AGR?
          ii) or nominal case pronouns that are written onto the verbs  
as an
              historical accident to save velum and stone carving  
effort?
   2) if we go with 1)a)i) then we need to do a bunch of INFL & AGR  
magic
   3) if we go with 1)a)ii) then we clash with every Arab speakers  
native
      intuition with regards to the default constituent order in their
      dialects, except for w/ Moroccan, Yemeni dialects (probably  
others)
      where VSO in the main clause for perfective is not unheard of.

   With imperfective the VSO order clashes with the SVO in the embedded
subject pronouns and in subordinate clauses with referent NPs.

   So whatever you do you have more than one word order with a lot of  
contextual determinants forcing one order or the other.

  It turns out in the Newspaper genre that SVO (even in the  
perfective) is a lot more prevalent than what you see in other  
literary genres, but all you have to do is scan the Machine  
Translation errors in Language Weaver or even Sakhr and more than a  
third of these errors involve misidentifying the following NP as the  
verb's object instead of the subject (thereby ruining the verb  
valences for the entire rest of the sentence).  This is strong  
evidence that VSO is the dominant word order for Standard Arabic, ! 
except! in subordinate clauses and with the embedded subject pronouns.

   As far as I am concerned if "native intuition" is your *only*  
source of data, then you are in trouble once you start working with  
Standard Arabic (or High German for a speaker of Swiss German for that  
matter).

   I will say that in order for someone to make a full accounting for  
the facts of the grammar of Standard Arabic that you will find in any  
corpus of post WWII Arabic, you will need to make some allowance for  
the fact that there is more than one unified grammar and lexicon at  
play.  This becomes especially true if you start looking at more  
informal uses of Standard Arabic, such as TV shows in front of live  
audiences or the ever-present "talking heads" show.  Even with chat- 
room data, where the matrix language is usually a dialect, you still  
need to make some accounting for facts from Standard Arabic.  Once you  
step into a cafe or train station in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria,  
Tunis), you just cannot ignore French either.

  Given these data from the over-whelming majority of all actual uses  
of the language, I don't see how you can explain even the simplest  
facts without having a formalism that allows the researcher to model  
mixed lects. I don't have to look very hard in my corpora to find data  
where there are obvious elements from Standard Arabic and a dialect in  
the same sentence sitting comfortably alongside elements that can  
arguably be from either.

  Given that mixed lect usage is the day-to-day reality for more than  
half of the language users on the planet, what explanatory power can  
any formalism/theory lay claim to if it restricts its theory and  
formalism to the study of "pure" and/or "core" grammars?


Dr. Andrew Freeman
Software Design Engineer microsoft
Masters student University of Washington (Professional Masters in  
Computational Linguistics)

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2)
Date: 03 Jan 2008
From:Ahmed Saleh Elimam <asaleh1111 at yahoo.com>
Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar

Hello
  "the question is which word order is the unmarked pattern?
As far as i know VSO is the default structure and SVO (as well as  
other variations are marked, some are marked more than others though).  
the thing with word order is its effect on meaning. the item that  
getrs foregrounded gets focused.
  I have writtenan article on this topic with examples of several  
arabic wrd-orders. it will be published in june, 08 inshalah

  Ahmed

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