Re: NG-NA correlation ...

JS Bangs wrote at 2003-10-07 13:40:15 (-0700)
 > Andreas Johansson sikyal:
 >
 > > In the languages I know of, noun-genitive syntax seems to
 > > correlate with noun- adjective, and similarly genitive-noun with
 > > adjective-noun. Is this a "universal" tendency, or just an
 > > artifact of the smallish sample?
 >
 > From what I know it's a statistical universal, but not an
 > absolute. (Like the statistical universal that languages have
 > exactly one rhotic :). It makes sense, because both noun-genitive
 > and noun-adjective are instances of the general pattern
 > head-modifier.
 >

It's certainly been proposed as one, but Matthew Dryer[1] says there's
actually no statistically significant correlation between
Noun-Adjective and Verb-Object order[2].

 | It is often mistakenly thought that that the order of adjective and
 | noun correlates with the order of object and verb, but it is now
 | known that this is not the case (see Dryer 1992).  It is often
 | thought that OV languages tend to be AN an that VO languages tend
 | to be NA, but it turns out in fact that this is not so, that NA is
 | somewhat more common than AN among both OV and VO languages.  Part
 | of the source of this problem is that the languages in the sample
 | used by Greenburg (1963) suggested that verb-initial languages tend
 | to be NA, but in fact this turns out to be an accidental property
 | of the six verb-initial languages in his sample, and AN order is as
 | common in verb-initial languages as it is in SVO and OV languages.
 | Another source of the mistaken impression many linguists had about
 | AN order in OV languages is that among the OV languages of Europe
 | and Asia, AN order is much more common than NA order.  This turns
 | out, however, to be an idiosyncracy of Eurasia: outside of Eurasia,
 | NA is clearly more common than AN among OV languages.[...]


As I think the NG-VO correlation is still accepted, this would imply
that NG-NA correlation doesn't exist.  Assuming he's right, of course,
which is something I'm not in a position to judge.


[1]http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/dryer.htm
[2]http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/word.order.shopen.pdf