Re: Word order

Quoting Tim May <butsuri@...>:

> At present, it's basically SOV, with postpositions.  It also has a
> general principle that modifier follows modified (suffixation,
> head-first compounds).  But this seems to be a fairly unusual
> situation.  LC-01 doesn't have adjectives (as distinct from verbs) but
> if it did, they'd follow the noun.  The only SOV language in Campbell
> where the adjective regularly follows the noun is Tibetan (which has
> both head first and head last compounds).
>
> So, why is this the case?  I've heard people talking about
> left-branching and right-branching languages, but I don't really
> understand the theoretical interpretation of this.
As I said in my last post, this is not so much of a problem as
it may sound.  The two largest languages in the world in terms
of population, Mandarin and English, are both predominantly
right-branching languages with the peculiarity that adjectives
precede the nouns they modify.  The terms "right-branching"
and "left-branching" are only meant as indicators of a general
tendency, not as absolutes.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
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