Re: Right-Branching vs. Left-Branching

> >Aha. Now it comes back to me. If you go by number of individual languages,
> >SVO comes out ahead. But if you go by language GROUPS then SOV wins by a
> >long shot.
>
> What source(s) do you have for that?  Also, how many non-IE SVO languages
> were originally SOV or something else, and then became SVO through IE
> influence?
I remember learning about the SOV/SVO stats in one of my linguistics classes,
probably my typology class. Unfortunately, I lost my textbook near the end of
the semester (which is annoying because now that I'm conlanging I could really
use it!), and I've moved twice since I took the course so I'm not sure where my
notes are, so I'm afraid I don't have a source for it. It might also have come
up in the syntactic theory seminar I took with the same professor, but again, I
couldn't tell you where I got the numbers.

(Incidentally, for those interested in textbooks, the text we used for the typology course
was Whaley's _Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of
Language_. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. I was also taking a semantics course at
the same time that complemented it very nicely. I can't remember offhand which
textbook we used for that one, but I do know I've referred to it since. I'll
check when I get home from work, but I seem to recall the author was Palmer.)

> Anyway, this whole thread (and the one I started about adpositional heads)
> was started because I am attempting to create a "logical language" -- i.e.,
> a language that is based more on formal logic than any natural language
> (that I know of).
Yikes. Sounds scary. My hat goes off to you. Or at least it would if I was wearing one. :)

Heather

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