[Lingtyp] Structural congruence

[Matthew Dryer]

On 1/20/16 6:59 PM, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
> Going back to word order, if we say that a language has prepositions 
> we already know something about this language's grammar, moreover, we 
> are able to make predictions about what else can be found in this 
> language and with what probability, aren't we?

Actually, if we know that a language has prepositions, we can only make 
limited predictions about the grammar of the language. If we know that a 
language has prepositions, we can predict that it is either a language 
whose grammar specifies the word order as VO or a grammar that has no 
rule governing the order of verb and object but where the factors 
conditioning the choice between OV and VO word order result in more 
frequent. But since the latter is not a fact about the grammar, you can 
make fewer predictions if you restrict attention to grammar.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160120/63549d31/attachment.htm>