[Lingtyp] Greenbergian universals predictions

Patrik Austin patrik.austin at gmail.com
Tue May 27 11:20:33 UTC 2025


Relating to Greenbergian syntactic universals, thank you for many
encouraging comments in my email back in April.

I still have a question for the typological (and the overall linguistic)
community. Can you say whether the scorecard on page 18 produces the
correct predictions relating to the order of object, subject, and verb in
the linked article?

https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008892/current.pdf?_s=PI4bhcyX_wqspQSb

Quote:

The novel prediction (Table 2) is generated by the following four rules:

(i) Each position in the transitive clause assigns a mathematical value for
S or O.

(ii) This value systematically decreases from left to right.

(iii) If SO, the value is positive.

(iv) If OS, the value is negative.



Order                 Points for position
                             Total

- SO -                 +2                        +1
+0

SOV                    S                          O
(V)                       +3

SVO                    S                          (V)
O                         +2

VSO                    (V)                       S
O                         +1

- OS -                 -2                         -1
                        -0

VOS                    (V)                       O
S                          -1

OVS                    O                         (V)
S                          -2

OSV                    O                         S
(V)                       -3
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