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Re: Greenberg's universals for SVO languages & Caos Pidgin ruff-sketch

From:Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
Date:Saturday, September 9, 2000, 4:40
Jonathon Change wrote:

> According to Greenberg's Universals (1963) SVO languages are:
[snip universals]
> etc. (in another words, the "universal" tendency of SVO languages - as >opposed to Mandarin and English - is to be right-branching, right/eh?) > > Is there any other "universals" or tendencies I should be aware of?
Here's a few more. -- case is less common, and when present, usually doesn't not follow an ergative pattern. -- often have definite articles (OV languages tend not to). -- demonstratives, numerals, and adjectives follow the noun in that order or the opposite order (adj, num, dem) -- often have relative pronouns -- conjunctions is of the form "X and X" rather than "and X and X" or "X and X and", the former is rare, the later is (possibly) unattested. -- prefixes are common for tense, case, etc. There are always some suffixes though. -- Subordinate clauses are often finite (e.g., "I want he goes" rather than "I want him to go"). Of course, as somebody pointed out in another message, universals are just statistics. I know of no absolute universals except things like "All languages have vowels". There are some I haven't seen counter-examples to, but those could be just because I haven't seen enough languages yet. =============================== Marcus Smith AIM: Anaakoot "When you lose a language, it's like dropping a bomb on a museum." -- Kenneth Hale ===============================