Some problems with the concept of basic word order

2006

Word order phenomena are versatile in the world’s languages. Fixed word-order languages as well as free word-order languages have constructions which allow deviations from the so-called “basic word order”. This paper sketches out a holistic approach to word order, based on Construction Grammar. This framework allows us to combine morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features in a unified description, and to bring forth the fact that word order as a linguistic phenomenon may be associated with a wide range of motivating factors. 1. Word order in Construction Grammar Word order phenomena are numerous, and concern—in one way or another—all languages. Even languages with fixed word order have constructions which permit word orders other than the so-called “basic word order” (in a Greenbergian sense; e.g. 1966). The most commonly evoked and the cross-linguistically most widespread variations are due to information structure. For example dislocations and cleft sentences are instances ...

A brief introduction on word order is given as introduction. The word order parameters have been discussed as they are relevant in typologizing a language based on these parameters. The relative word order of subject, verb and object gives rise to six types: SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and SVO. The correlations among word order parameters such as Greenberg’s correlations have been described. Generalization of Greenberg’s results also discussed. This is followed by a discussion on the value of word order typology, deeper explanations for word order universals, and methodological problem with reference to subject, object, indirect object and variant word orders. After this a discussion on factors determining word order is given. Under this heading the basic principles, topicalization hierarchies, and position of clitic pronouns have been discussed.

This chapter presents several approaches to the syntax of verb-initial (V1) languages with a special emphasis on Mayan and Austronesian languages. Some V1 languages are strictly VSO, others are VOS, and a significant number combine both orders. This chapter focuses on data from VSO/VOS languages and the factors that underlie these alternations. A number of V1 languages can be more adequately characterized as predicate-initial, with V1 representing just a subset of possible clause-initial predicates. The chapter presents a number of structural properties that are or may be associated with V1 and discusses possible implicational relations between such properties and V1. While there are certain common characteristics observed across V1 languages, it is also clear that there are several distinct subtypes of V1. These subtypes call for different syntactic analyses; main approaches include the derivation of V1 via phrasal movement (VP-raising) and via head-movement (verb-raising). Other approaches to the derivation of V1 include the parametrization of specifier direction within a single language, nonconfigurational syntax, and subject lowering. In addition to these syntactic analyses, several recent approaches place the derivation of V1 outside syntax or at the syntax-PF interface. Careful, in-depth analyses of individual languages are required to test the different approaches to V1; in quite a few cases such analyses are still lacking.

Belgian Journal of Linguistics 1, 95-125, 1986

"Interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors on basic word order in the languages of Europe",Bernini, G. e Schwartz, M. L. (edited by), Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe, Berlin / New York, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 357-544. ISBN: 3-11-015753-5., 2006

a different distribution according to whether it is syntactically encoded as S or as O and/or whether it has the SF of agent (= A) or of patient (= P). The options relating to a particular distribution are, of course, dependent on the typological characteristics of the various languages.

Sergey Say. Grammaticalization of word order: Evidence from Lithuanian. In: Olga Fischer, Murial Norde & Harry Perridon (eds). Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization. [= Typological studies in language, 59]. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. 363–384. , 2004

The role of word order phenomena in the study of grammaticalisation is somewhat unclear. 1 On the one hand, word order processes do not seem to fit into the narrow understanding of grammaticalisation as a development of once lexical units into grammatical ones. On the other hand, ever since Meillet's path-breaking article on grammaticalisation (1912), it has been acknowledged that "the grammatical fixing of word order (. . . ) is a phenomenon "of the same order" as the grammaticalization of individual words" (Hopper & Traugott 1993: 23 and further reference to Meillet). Moreover, regardless of theoretical persuasions of individual researchers, 'grammaticalisation of word order' is a collocation that is repeatedly used in diachronic syntax referring to the process of emergence of a rigid 'grammatical' word order instead of loose 'pragmatic' one. And yet, apparent reversibility of word order changes as well as differences in the very character of developing linguistic forms led to viewing the fixing of word order as at best a rather peripheral case of grammaticalisation (see Hopper & Traugott 1993: 50-56 for an in-depth discussion). 2 In what follows I present a case study of a diachronic word order process in Lithuanian and try to build it into the theory of grammaticalisation, which is primarily based on the study of the more usual lexicon-to-grammar scenario of grammaticalisation.

Folia Linguistica, 2000

This article provides a comparative analysis of word order in Spanish, French and Italian. We first consider word order in general, and show that Spanish has all types of word order except SOV (i.e. SVO, VOS, OSV, VSO and OVS), while Italian lacks SOV and VSO, and French lacks SOV, VSO and OVS. Taking a constructional view on grammaticalization and language change, we argue that the different word order patterns can be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization. We provide evidence for a continuum from Spanish → Italian → French, Spanish being the least grammaticalized, and French the most grammaticalized language. In the second part of the article we provide further evidence for our claim by focusing on the distribution of a particular type of word order shared by all three languages, VOS, where the subject is typically narrowly focused. VOS occurs in four discourse contexts in Spanish and Italian, but it is subject to additional restrictions in Italian. In French it appears only in one of the four discourse contexts of Spanish and Italian. Our hypothesis is that this is a case of progressive grammaticalization with respect to the interface between grammatical structure (the VOS word order) and information structure. Independent evidence for our claim comes from the distribution of clefts in Romance, which are a functional variant of VOS. This phenomenon, which developed in Romance as an innovative mechanism used to narrowly focus a constituent, shows the reversed pattern as the one observed for VOS: it is most developed in French, least in Spanish while it is progressing in modern Italian.

While some languages, like English, require subject and object arguments to appear in a specific/fixed sentential position, some others, like Turkish, allow freer variation in argument location. It is clear that speakers/listeners of strict-word-order languages interpret grammatical relations on the basis of the location of subject and object arguments especially if these arguments are semantically reversible. That is, when an English-speaking person hears a sentence like The doctor saw the patient, the structural and probabilistic pattern of the language leads her to assign the subject role to the first argument and object role to the second one. However, it is less clear what processes are involved in a free/flexible-word-order language. Do speakers of flexible-word-order languages first construct the structure of a canonical sentence and then compute the necessary syntactic operations to assign the arguments the correct roles? The fact that non-canonical ordering of arguments may lead to mis-interpretations or longer processing times has often been taken as a support for the syntactic theories suggesting that non-canonical orders are derived by a syntactic operation called movement ). Yet, studies investigating the processing of word order variation in various languages have yielded conflicted findings as to whether or not non-canonical orders lead to an increased processing cost (for a review, see .