Re: Hi! Introduction and OSV

Sharon wrote at 2005-01-08 00:40:06 (-0800)
 > Hi everyone! I've been a lurker of this mailing list on and off for
 > the past two years or so, and I guess I've found a reason now to
 > delurk (although there might not be a very noticeable difference;
 > I'm usually several days behind posts and you all usually say
 > everything worth saying anyway ;).

Welcome to the list, Sharon.  I hope you will find more opportunities
to post in future, and discuss your language with us.

 > I'm really, really excited about this yet unnamed language, for
 > it's getting more and more complex as I sit through more Chemistry
 > classes and so far it's *not a relex*!! (--although it's one of my
 > greatest fears that it might eventually degenerate to that).
 >
 > Well, anyway, the point of all that was (a) to be a somewhat
 > concise history on my linguistic background and also (b) to bring
 > me to my question:
 >
 > When I first began writing out this language, I decided on a whim
 > to give it an OSV syntax, and so far, with simple sentences and
 > such, it hasn't given me any problems so far. However, lately I've
 > started realizing that I know nothing about OSV languages in
 > general _at all_, and this information is rather hard to come by in
 > the library and the last time I checked Google it wasn't very much
 > help.
 >
 > Would anyone have any general information on OSV syntax which I
 > could use, then? :)

The thing about OSV languages is that they're vanishingly rare.  OSV
is by most counts the rarest of the six possible orderss, with only a
handful of examples known (and the OSV status of many if not all of
these is debatable).  So it's difficult to come up with any
statistically reliable idea of what a typical OSV language looks like.

However, since SVO, VSO and VOS languages look more like each other
than like SOV languages, it's fairly widely held that the important
opposition is between VO and OV languages.  To the extent that this is
true, OSV (and OVS) languages should resemble SOV.

Here's Matthew Dryer on the subject:

 | While a number of languages have been claimed to be OSV, the
 | evidence so far presented for these languages is less than
 | convincing.
 |
 | What word order characteristics are typical of object-initial
 | languages?  Unfortunately, the number of clear cases of such
 | languages is sufficiently small that we cannot really answer this
 | question with any confidence.  The fact that the characteristics in
 | other languages pattern with the order of object and verb would
 | lead us to expect both OVS and OSV languages to pattern with SOV
 | languages.  In so far as we have evidence, this prediction seems to
 | be true.  For example, Hixkaryana [the best known OVS language -TM]
 | is postpositional and GN, as illustrated in (35).
 |
 | (35)  a. maryeya ke		b. Waraka kanawa-ri
 | 	    knife   with	   Waraka canoe-POSSD	
 | 	    NP	 Po		     G	    N
 | 	    'with a knife'	   'Waraka's canoe'

http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/word.order.shopen.pdf