Diachronic vs. synchronic universals/tendencies

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This is the second part of my reply to Alexis's post:
 
> One, consider
> Mandarin Chinese, where there seems to be
> a clear trend towards SOV because it
> often now prefers S ba O V to simple
> SVO (where ba is some kind of verb),
 
While this idea has been tossed around since the 70's,
it is IMO (and not mine alone) a serious distortion of
the facts.  The ba-construction is a marked construction,
it is not by any means the normal transitive pattern.
As far as I can see, there is not only no "clear trend"
toward SOV in Mandarin, there is no trend at all.
 
But even if this story were true, it would not be a problem
for what I am suggesting.  If indeed some peculiar combination
of diachronic processes in Mandarin were producing a "disharmonic"
disagreement between PP and VP order, that would be no problem at
all for my account--but, I submit, a fatal problem for an innatist
theoretical account.
 
> but as ba O illustrates new kinds of
> adpositional phrases made with a verb
> that becomes an adposition are in fact
> pre- and not postpositional, so here
> we have a diachronic process which seems
> designed to yield an SOV language with
> prepositions of verbal origin, the opposite
> of what Scott suggests.  And if this is
> possible and if in addition tehre is no
> purely synchronic tendency to make OV
> languages postpositional, then we would
> have expect no correlation between OV
> and postpositions. But we do.
 
But we don't find a perfect correlation.  (Partly because
adpositions can develop from relator nouns as well as from
serial verbs, but that's a separate issue).  Note that what
you're proposing here (incorrectly, but let's assume it for
the sake of argument) is a combination of two diachronic processes--
one, the serial verb > adposition story, a very common one, the
other, the ba-construction as the entering wedge of a SVO > SOV
shift, a very unusual one, in fact probably unique to Mandarin.
(Except that, as I've said, it's not really happening, so it's
even more unusual than that).  If that were true, then we would
have to say that the usual diachronic process, by itself, produces
the usual "harmonic" pattern, but that an unusual diachronic process,
or combination of processes, can produce an unusual pattern.  But
that's exactly what the diachronic account implies, and exactly
what a synchronic theoretical account does not imply.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html