Re: OSV Italian Particles

At 06:47 PM 4/23/2000 -0700, Jim Grossmann wrote:
>I offer the following from some notes I got from a linguist;
>
>Languages can be broadly classified into VO (verb before the object) and OV
>(verb after the object).
>
>Generally speaking ...
>
>"VO languages have prepositions;   OV languages have postpositions.
>VO languages have wh movement;   OV languages do not.
>In VO languages, the order is N-Adj;   in OV languages, ADJ-N.
>In VO languages, the order is head-noun relative clause;   in OV languages,
>rel-N.
>In VO languages, the AUX precedes the verb;  in OV languages it is V-AUX."
>
>Jim here, again, with this commentary:
>
>Deviation from these tendencies is NOT necessarily unnatural.  English, for
>example, is VO, but has ADJ-N.    Generally, the more of the above
>generalizations a language violates, the stranger (typologically) it looks.
>However, a conlang should not be dismissed as a picture of an impossible
>language merely because its grammar doesn't conform to tendencies listed
>above.
Some deviations from these patterns are more common than others.  For
example, the order of noun and attributive adjective correlates only very
weakly with other word-order characteristics.  Thus there are lots of
languages that are basically VO but Adj-N (like English) or basically OV
but N-Adj (like Basque).

- Tim