Re: OSV; was: Italian Particles

At 12:50 PM 4/22/2000 -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Sally Caves wrote:
>> In an OSV or an SOV language, where do the "wh" or question words go?
>
>IIRC, Japanese, a SOV lang, places question words right before the verb.
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.

- Tim