First Thoughts on Syntactic Indices

Abstract

0. Greenberg's use of objective measures derived from morphology (for the most part) as a device for typological classification and John Carroll's use of similar measures in a stylistic study of English' suggest that some sort of useful numerical indices might be obtained from syntactical characteristics of languages. Some of the most obvious and frequently mentioned syntactical differences do not easily lend themselves to this technique; for instance, the presence or absence of something which can reasonably be called a 'case system', or 'tense', or 'aspect', the use of structural signs for the subject of intransitive verbs similar to those for either the object or else the subject of transitive verbs, the use of the orders SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV, or OVS as necessary or preferred in transitive sentences, the presence or absence of an inclusive-exclusive contrast in person markers, of a dual number (or of number as a category at all), of suppletion in the verb system-all these, and many more like them, are difficult to reduce to a meaningful number.