Word Order Variations in Shabaki

Abstract

Word order types constitute the most well- established and frequently cited generalization in language typology. Basic or canonical word order tends to fall into two main types: SOV (about 48% of world languages) or SVO (about 41%). SOV is assumed to have been the predominant and unmarked word order in most of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, as well as in Iranian languages. This paper investigates the basic word order in Shabaki, a modern northwest language of the Indo-Iranian family spoken by the Shabaki minority in Iraq. This study also measures the word order variation and provides a typological description of this language. An examination of Shabaki data reveals that it follows SOV, OSV, SVO, VSO, OVS, and VOS word order patterns in mono-transitive sentences. The most frequent (predominant and unmarked) word order in declarative sentences in Shabaki is SOV where the initial position is occupied by a nominative noun phrase, but constituents can appear at any position, creating grammatical sentences with different discursive distributions. In ditransitive sentences, (S) DO V IO is proven to be three fold higher in number than (S) IO V DO. (S) DO IO V and (S) IO DO V were also found in data. Keywords: Agreement, basic word order, case, clitics, Indo-Iranian languages, language typology, Shabaki Introduction Grammatical relations in human languages, such as those between a noun phrase and the verb, are primarily expressed by means of three different morphosyntactic strategies: word order, case marking, and agreement (Croft 1990: 101). All languages, rather than relying on just one of these mechanisms, use some combination of the three. In this paper, it is the intention to explore what elements of these three strategies Shabaki language employs to indicate the relationship that a noun bears to the verb in a clause. It also tries to explore the order of objects in ditransitive sentences.