Re: OSV; was: Italian Particles

At 01:15 PM 4/22/2000 -0700, Marcus Smith wrote:
>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
Interesting.  Isn't Chickasaw closely related to Choctaw?  A few years ago
I read a few paragraphs about Choctaw in Timothy Shopen's _Language
Typology and Syntactic Description_ and found it so intriguing that I
immediately started working out a conlang grammar based loosely on it
(_very_ loosely, obviously, since those few paragraphs are all I know about
Choctaw).  Somewhat to my surprise, this has become one of a handful of
favorites among the many conlang ideas that I keep simmering on the back
burners of my mind; it's one of the few that I often find myself
consciously thinking about.

- Tim