No Proto-Celtic: word order

[bruce fraser]

I'm not conversant with the details for Latin, but in ancient Greek there
are three aspects of S, V, and O ordering which could usefully be
considered:

1) Clauses with explicit subject, ver b and object are in the minority
(around 30%), and, in fact, clauses with explicit subjects are also in the
minority, so 3-term and even 2-term (subject and verb) orderings are not,
strictly speaking, major features of the language. So all such typological
generalizations have severe limitations as models.

2) Explanations based purely on pragmatic criteria risk being logically
circular (first position is emphatic: therefore what is in first position
must be emphatic; similarly for theme-first). Pragmatic analyses might be
more informative if they attempted to integrate surrounding clauses in their
explanations: for example, a following relative clause modifying the main
clause subject will encourage VS, while a complement may encourage VO.

3) The words themselves affect their order. Pronouns tend to precede verbs
not just if they are enclitic, and so (often) in second position, but
because they are always small: orthotonic personal pronouns like 'ego' and
demonstratives also normally precede verbs. So do nouns, because in
classical Greek they are usually smaller (verbs have more extensive
inflections. This may not apply to earlier Greek, where enclitic verbs were
common, or later Greek, where the change to a stress accent changes the
picture).

In sum, word order appears to reflect 'weight to the right' (cf. Behaghel
1909 and many subsequent commentators). I would not wish to bore with
statistical detail, or enumerate possible reasons (interesting though such
speculation might be) but simply suggest two general rules-of-thumb, which
might apply to all the languages we're studying:
1) 'structure' does not equal 'syntax': word morphology is also crucial.
2) 'clause' does not equal 'sentence': clause linking is also important.

Bruce Fraser