Re: free word-order conlangs

> >On 7/17/06, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
> But -- forgive me if I've misunderstood -- isn't there some Australian
> language in which words can indeed completely leave the NPs and move
> anywhere in the clause?  And can't that happen to more than one NP in the
> same clause, and to more than one word in the same NP?
>
> Perhaps the language I am thinking of is Warlpiri.
Yes, that's one of them; it is indeed Australian.  This is a common
sort of thing in Warlpiri's family, although I couldn't say if every
Pama-Nyungan language has this feature, or whether this feature is
widely-spread outside of the Pama-Nyungan family in other languages of
Australia.

[snip]
> Some languages allow you to move clauses around within sentences, but not
> to move phrases around within clauses.
> Some languages allow you to move phrases around within clauses, but not to
> move words around within phrases.
> Some languages allow you to move clauses around within sentences and also
> allow you to move phrases around within clauses, but do not allow you to
> move phrases out of their "home" clauses within the sentence.
>
That's pretty much correct; what I said in my implicational hierarchy
was a sort of oblique way of saying that.  When we have the hierarchy
w > x > y > z, we can either say "there exist languages with w that
don't x, and with w and x that don't y, etc." or we can say "every
language with x also ws, and every language with y also ws and xs,
etc."  It comes to the same in the end.

We'd have to be careful of the last one, though.  Allowing a phrase to
"runaway" from its "home" -- it's a good metaphor, btw -- is different
than the near-complete disregard for constituency we'd find in, say,
Warlpiri.  Just running away from home isn't all that strange -- And
gives us a few in English, Russian gives us even more freedom, etc.
In these cases, the words still clearly have "homes", whereas we might
stretch the metaphor to say that words in Warlpiri are basically
nomadic.

[snip]
> Consider it's _me_ you're replying to; have mercy on my limitations, and
> please be explicit; _what_'s the motivation again?  That the most
> emphasized "thing", whether it is an immediate constituent or something
> smaller (a constituent of a constituent) -- that is, whether it's a noun-
> phrase or a word within a noun-phrase -- can be moved to the front (even if
> that means breaking up the middle-sized constituent of which it is part)?
Yup, the motivation would, in this case, be emphasis.  When we say
"motivation" in this case it just means "why is the constituent moving
from where we'd expect it?"  A modern Chomskian theory is going to
require motivation for each transformation -- you can't just move
things for no reason at all.

This is why there's so much talk about Warlpiri and its relatives.  If
we posit that sentences are base generated with constituents, Russian
doesn't provide a problem, since that one movement is "motivated"...
Warlpiri proposes a problem for this: if Warlpiri sentences are
generated with constituents, then we have to come up with some reason
why they scramble themselves all over the place.  Specifically, a
reason for why does this word move there, and not just a blanked
statement "They do so for informational-saliency reasons."

So some linguists will hold up Warlpiri as a counterexample to the
idea that sentences are generated "underlyingly" with constituency.
That is, a theory that says "Warlpiri looks like English in underneath
but all the words get scrambled" would have to abandon the idea that
all movement happens for some reason.

-- Pat