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Re: THEORY: two questions

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Friday, March 24, 2000, 20:45
On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Matt Pearson wrote:

> A colleague of mine and I here in the linguistics department were racking > our brains about this one, and as far as we could determine, based on our > collective knowledge of the world's languages, there's no significant > correlation. I can think of at least one head-marking and one dependent- > marking language for each word order type: > > Verb-initial, head-marking: Marshallese, Chamorro (?) > Verb-initial, dep-marking: Tagalog, Polynesian lgs > Verb-medial, head-marking: Swahili, Mohawk > Verb-medial, dep-marking: Russian > Verb-final, head-marking: Lakhota, many Papuan lgs > Verb-final, dep-marking: Japanese, Yidiny > > So I guess you have your choice...
Indeed. While there are examples of each, Nichols claims to show that there is in fact a statistical correlation between verb- initial languages and head marking. Though some have questioned the reliability of her conclusions ... Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu