Re: R: Re: Greenberg's universals

"SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY" wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, J Matthew Pearson wrote:
>
> > > >Yesterday I borrowed Greenberg's 'Language Universals' (1966 by Mouton &
> > > >Co.) from Como's library. I read it all yesterday evening, but there were no
> > > >hints to word-order universals (those like 'VSO langs generally do not have
> > > >articles'). Were these universals published only in 'Universals of Language'
> > > >(1963)?
> >
> > Just a quick footnote to this thread:  Who says that VSO languages generally do
> > not have articles?  That's clearly false.
>
> I think this stems from a misunderstanding of a previous conversation. I
> mentioned that SVO languages tend to have *definite* articles (ie,
> distinct from demonstratives), while the others often have no articles or
> use the demonstratives for this role.
If by "the others" you mean all other word order types, I don't think that's a valid
tendency.  The language groups I mentioned in my previous post, with verb-initial
order, all have definite articles lexically distinct from demonstratives.  Moreover,
it's not hard to think of languages (Indonesian) and language groups (Slavic,
Chinese, Bantu, perhaps Algonquian) with verb-medial order and no articles.

The only generalization I would hazard is that verb-final languages tend not to have
articles--and even that is just a guess on my part, based on casual observation.

Matt.