Re: [tied] Got to thinkin' about word order

Glen,

You've got to be careful with such implicational universals (apart from the fact that it's always advisable to take them with a grain of salt, as most of such correlations are tendential rather than really universal). It's more common for linguists to insist that Neg V is the expected order in an SVO language, but that implies NOTHING about SOV. Dryer (1988) demolished the popular view (endorsed e.g. by Lehmann) that SOV implied V Neg. In his sample of 117 SOV languages (from 23 families) Neg V was found in exactly one-third of cases (39 languages).

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2003 3:11 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Got to thinkin' about word order


>
> I said:
> >IE doesn't seem to have the typical order that an SOV language should have
> >(such as the placement of the negative before the verb, and relative
> >particles placed before the clause).
>
> Piotr:
> >What makes you think that *ne wasn't placed before the verb?
>
> Ugh, Piotr, you misunderstood. We agree completely. You're trying to
> convince
> someone that wasn't even objecting to a PIE SOV order. Reread the above.
>
> I _do_ think that *ne was placed before the verb. But a typical SOV language
> like say Turkish seems to have negatives AFTER the verb. In IE, this order
> only appears in questions as with Latin /Estne?/ and that seems strange for
> an SOV language... but I do not deny that IE was SOV, just not "typical" SOV
> because it was in a state of transition from SOV to SVO as I just said.
>
> I'm certain that the earliest layers WERE of an SOV order, the same tendency
> as seen in Uralic and Altaic. I've mentioned this before. The transition of
> SOV to SVO was thought by the author to be occuring _while_ IE was splitting
> up, and thus was not complete. I'm agreeing with this idea and see a couple
> of steps happening between the "true" SOV state of pre-IE and the atypical
> SOV state with negatives before verbs of IE proper.
>
>
> - gLeN