ordering of person markers

[Rankin, Robert L]

> I don't know how you will get this to be accepted by the
theoreticians, but the real facts about Lakhota person markers are that
they occur in the order in which they were historically added to the verb.

AND this problem extends far beyond just the pronominals.  It clearly DOES
apply to the pronominals, but it is also the determining factor in post
verbal clitic ordering too.  There is a paper coauthored by me, John Boyle,
Randy and John Koontz that makes this point among others.  I've been
preaching it in most of the papers I've given over the past 3 or 4 years.

Synchronists (and I'm reacting to the situation in my own dept. here, guys)
have taken to believing that word/morpheme order is strictly and 100%
governed by syntactic rules -- often simply reflecting "UG".  To anyone with
an ounce of serious work in historical linguistics, it is obvious that
constituent ordering is often the result of historical fluke, reanalysis,
boundary collapse, etc.  Without mastery of the historical development of
the syntax of a language, linguists will quite generally fail in trying to
differentiate what orderings evince aspects of UG and what orderings are
accidents of history.  And they don't want to hear this.  And in my dept.
they REALLY don't want to hear it -- our syntactician's degree is in
psychology, and she's never had a course in historical ling.  She says
openly that it's just "that old fusty outmoded Grimm's Law stuff."

I just made an enemy at out Colloquium when a (very smart) Chinese student
presented a paper "showing" that the ordering of the infamous morpheme /ba/
in Chinese was derived from UG.  I rashly pointed out that "ba" is known to
have been a verb at one time, and, that it is still located syntactically
EXACTLY where verbs in Chinese sentences have always been located.
Historically, additional phrases, etc. have been added to the end of the
clause, but "ba" has never moved.  It hasn't undergone a "universal"
movement rule as it has become grammaticalized; it just never budged at all.
It wasn't a popular comment.

So the point David has perceptively made here is not trivial at all.  It is
central to our continuing understand of synchronic syntax in all languages.

Off my soapbox now. . . .

Bob