Re: THEORY: two questions

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