VO Languages Research Articles

On acquiring an (S)VO language: subjectless sentences in children’s Hebrew

On acquiring an (S)VO language: subjectless sentences in children’s Hebrew

Object-verb order and adjective-noun order: Dispelling a myth

It is widely believed (Greenberg (1963), Lehmann (1973), Vennemann (1974)) that there is a relationship between the order of object and verb and the order of adjective and noun, that OV languages tend to be AdjN, while VO languages tend to be NAdj. Evidence against this is presented here from a sample of 316 languages.

On the So-Called Sov Word Order in Mandarin Chinese: A Quantified Text Study and Its Implications

Two theses concerning word order in Mandarin Chinese have been investigated through a quantified study of written and spoken contemporary Mandarin. It is found, first, that Mandarin is synchronically a typical VO language, in terms of text distribution of VO and OV orders. OV appears at the level of 10% or lower in text, and this is true for both definite and indefinite objects. Further, the functional distribution of OV in both texts suggests that it is an emphatic/contrastive discourse device, having little to do with the contrast between definite and indefinite object. Finally, neither the evidence from our text distribution data nor a comparison with a recent study of the acquisition of Mandarin by native children suggests the existence of a diachronic drift toward SOV order. *

On the underlying order of Early West Saxon

Recent work by Lightfoot (1976a, 1977) and Malsch (1976) has led to conflicting hypotheses about the underlying order of old English. Lightfoot hypothesizes that OE is an SOV language, while Malsch hypothesizes that it is a VO language. Although Malsch's argument is far more rigorous than Lightfoot's, both arguments are unconvincing because both suffer from a conspicuous lack of attention to the data available in surviving OE texts:Lightfoot asserts the nonexistence of constructions which do in fact exist (1977: 211), while Malsch cites only constructions drawn or elaborated from secondary sources (39, note 1). Furthermore, the two arguments are not directly opposed to each other. Lightfoot argues for a verb-final underlying order and an NP Postposing rule, while Malsch argues for a verb-initial underlying order and a Verb Postposing rule. Neither argues against the postposing rule of the other. At the same time, their only common assumptions seem to be that underlying representations of sentences have linear ordering and that surface auxiliaries in OE are derived from higher verbs.

Sobre el orden de palabras en griego: el genitivo adnominal

The aim of this paper is to show that the relative order of Genetive and governing noun is determined, at least in Attic literary prose of ca . 400 B. C., by a syntactic rule, according to which, Ablative or Partitive Genetive follows the main noun, and Possessive Genetive goes before the modified noun. A selection from Lysias, Thucydides, Antiphon, Andocides, and Pseudo-Xenophon’s Resp. Ath . has been taken into account for the purpose. The syntactic determination of Greek word order being at any case taken for granted, a set of lexical rules is previously established in order to give a sounder account of the evidence; in the author's view, the disproving instances are due either to emphatic reasons or to the overlapping of two rules. A second class of lexical rules can be inferred from the position of the article. May the proposed syntactic rule be right, Classical Greek is a VO language as well an OV one.

The Case of an (S)VO Language: Subjectless Constructions in Modern Hebrew

Modern Hebrew is examined as an instance of an (S)VO language-in that, like Russian (but unlike English or French), it has a wide range of sentence-types lacking an overt grammatical subject. These include (a) the semantically and structurally related classes of existential and possessive sentences; (b) impersonal sentences with 3pl. verbs which may function in place of agentless passives; (c) dative-marked experiential sentences with predicates such as 'cold' or 'sad'; and (d) environmental comments about time, weather etc. Typological correlates of a language's tolerance for subjectless constructions are then suggested: thus Hebrew, while basically SVO, makes wide use of verb-initial constructions; the language is not 'subject-dominant', either structurally or pragmatically; and it tolerates numerous fronting operations. It is concluded that the class of constructions which may be subjectless across languages is not random, but predictable along the lines suggested for Hebrew.*

A Structural Principle of Language and Its Implications

Sentence qualifier markers, like those indicating interrogation and negation, are placed before verbs in consistent VO languages, after verbs in consistent OV languages. This placement principle permits us to identify other sentence qualifiers, like potential, desiderative, and reflexive. It also provides means for distinguishing qualifier markers from congruence as well as deixis markers. Moreover, it has morphological and phonological implications, leading to so-called agglutinative structure. Besides contributing to our understanding of linguistic structure, this principle enables us to clarify some problems in the historical development of languages.*

Contemporary Linguistics and Indo-European Studies

Recent linguistic studies, particularly the extension of structural analysis to the syntactic component of language and improved typological analysis, have made possible an increased understanding of Proto-Indo-European and the early Indo-European dialects. The new insights permit us to account for syntactic constructions such as the placement of relative clauses, adjectives, and genitives; the use of prepositions in VO, postpositions in OV languages; comparative constructions of the order STANDARD PIVOT ADJECTIVE in OV, ADJECTIVE PIVOT STANDARD in VO languages. As an illustration of a further pattern which can now be explained, the absolutes in the early dialects are examined, and accounted for as constructions that may arise in ambivalent languages. Besides contributing to an understanding of syntactic phenomena, current linguistic theory assists us in achieving further knowledge about Proto-Indo-European and further insights into the development of the Indo-European languages.

Converging Theories in Linguistics

Process models of language, and generative grammars, receive support from typological theory. Typological study has found that some syntactic constructions can be correlated with characteristic sentence patterns. Thus consistent OV languages have relative clauses, possessives, and adjectives preceding nouns; consistent VO languages show the converse order. The parallelism between the three constructions can be accounted for in process models, and related to the position of the object with regard to the verb in both OV and VO languages. The central importance of the verb in language as indicated in these and other constructions is pointed up by recent neurological investigations supporting descriptive and generative theory which proposes that verbs have the primary role in sentences. These observations illuminate syntactic patterns in New High German, in Latin and the Romance languages; they also indicate that a framework is now available for historical and descriptive syntactic study.