Re: OSV; was: Italian Particles

At 4/22/00 03:32 PM -0400, you wrote:

>So does Turkish, which is also SOV.  (Actually, IIRC, it can also be in
>whatever position the corresponding full noun phrase would normally go in,
>but the immediate preverbal position is preferred, especially in the
>literary language.)  The immediate preverbal position is the focus position
>in Turkish, and I believe also in Japanese and in most other SOV languages.
> And in fact the wh-word is the focus: it's the item of new information
>that's being solicited.
I'd like to hold Chickasaw up as a counter-example to this generalization, but
there is a good reason why it does not conform.

Chickasaw may only have one case marked object (direct, indirect, or
oblique).
All others are unmarked, and must occur immediately before the verb.  The case
marked object usually appears immediately before the string of unmarked
objects
and verb.  Which object gets case marked is determined by general
discourse/semantic factors, not grammatical function.  New information is
usually case marked, presumablly because doing so makes it stand out from the
rest.

Marcus