Re: me and my languages

Dear Marcus,

It is true that Hungarian has fairly free word order, but still has a
certain amount of restraint even so (i.e., adjectives tend to precede their
nouns, the stressed concept precedes the verb). And even in free word-order
languages I think you'd be hard-pressed to find, for example, one in which
an adverbial modifier preceded the imperative (i.e., here come vs. come
here). Of course, you could get round this by having verbs which mean "come
here" - something akin to "approach!". At the level of a bare-bones Verb
Phrase "The man hit the boy" type word order in such languages may be free.
Anything more complicated, involving relativity for example, will tend to
condition structure. My own language Omeina uses a suffixed relative marker,
An-te ai-na-di bere-n aito-de na (man-erg : did-he-me : see-that : father-my
: is) = the man who saw me is my father (hyphens show morpheme boundaries in
each case). Nested relative clauses are no problem, since each relative
marker is suffixed to the relevant verb.

Mike Poxon.
----- Original Message -----
From: "SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY" <smithma@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 7:04 PM
Subject: Re: me and my languages


> On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Jesse Bangs wrote:
>
> > >     Anyway, I think I'm realizing my question here.  Is it feasible
> > that
> > > there could be a language with no preferred word order whatsoever
since
> > all
> > > the information is encoded in the verb?
> >
> > Yes.  I have heard that Hungarian has no preferred word order (Frank
> > Valoczy will verify this), and it isn't even as agglutinative as this.
>
> The question of whether a language has a preferred word order or not is, I
> think, misframed. The question should address what kind of
> pragmatic/semantic functions the various word orders play.
>
> To use a natlang example: Pima allows subjects and objects to occur on
> either side of the verb, in either order relative to each other. The
> various orders to logically equivalent in meaning, but have different
> effects. For example, the initial word of the sentence often introduces a
> new entity into the discourse. ("What did you buy?" "A book bought I".)
> Post-verbal nouns usually correspond to information that has already been
> introduced and has been backgrounded. As a complication, if two new
> entities are being introduced into the discourse, only one can occur
> initially (for obvious reasons), and the other is usually kicked into the
> post-verbal area. There is no single preferred order, but a different
> preferred order for each different type of sentence.
>
> The most neutral pragmatic word order in my conlang Telek is SOV:
>
> Jan-al bilty ke-fanna-'ni.
> John-NOM salmon AsA-eat-PERF
> 'John ate the salmon'
>
> If the object is the topic or focus of the sentence, then the word order
> is OSV:
>
> Bilty-yd Jan-al ke-fanna-'ni
> salmon-ACC John-NOM AsA-eat-PERF
> 'The salmon, John ate.' (But he didn't eat the pie, for example.)
>
> Verbs can be initial if the action of the sentence is under focus:
>
> Ke-fanna-'ni Jan-al bilty-yd.
> AsA-eat-PERF John-NOM salmon-ACC
> 'John ATE the salmon.' (He didn't throw it back.)
>
> SVO order usually appears when the object clarifies an incorporated
> element, almost like an afterthought (but not really). For example:
>
> Jan-al ke-kiingi-fanna-'ni.
> John-NOM AsA-fish-eat-PERF
> 'John ate fish.'
>
> Jan-al ke-kiingi-fanna-'ni bilty-yd.
> John-NOM AsA-fish-eat-PERF salmon-ACC
> 'John ate fish, salmon.'
>
> Even an OVS order can be used, when the object is "generic", that is, when
> the sentence does not refer to a specific example of the object, but to
> the class in general. This also requires the verb to have focus over the
> subject.
>
> Bilty ke-fanna Jan-al.
> salmon AsA-eat John-NOM
> 'Eat salmon, John does (regularly).' (As opposed to eating trout or
> throwing salmon back after he catches it.)
>
> Marcus

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