Re: Greenberg's Word Order Universals

At 10:47 pm -0700 14/9/00, Marcus Smith wrote:
>        There are SOV
>languages that do not allow S or O to occur after the V, so why should that be
>the case for VSO?  I find it significant, even if somewhat vague, and with
>much
>more to be investigated.
Yes, I'd basically go along with that.

But Greenberg didn't say: "Some SOV do not allow either the S or the O to
occur after the V, but all known VSO languages do allow either the S or the
O to occur before the verb in certain circumstances."

But he said, rather:
"All languages with dominant VSO order have SVO as an alternative or as the
only alternative basic order."

This seems to imply that in VSO langs, if there is a departure from VSO, it
is most likely to be SVO.  This IME is not the case in Welsh.  The
departure from VSO occurs because, if there is a focus, it is put first.
OVS is probably, therefore, more likely.

>>>60 langs from all corners of the globe come to mind, but I'm
>>>really not sure.  There was a 300 lang one (IIRC), but I don't know who
>>>did that one.
>
>>How much credence would a statistician give to results obtained from
>>Greenberg's sampling?
>
>There's been lots of work on that exact topic since Greenberg started this:
>how
>to create a statistically significant sampling.  I take this as an implication
>that perhaps Greenberg's sample was not significant enough.
This is certainly what I've understood.

>If the 60 figure
>is right, then it surely is not.  300 may be, if the selections were random,
>and distributed across families and areas so that there is no clumping.
IIRC this is another criticism of his sampling.

>Clumping would introduce the possibility that similarities are due to
>borrowing
>or genetic inheritance.
Indeed.  And, of course, because humans have this tiresome habit of wanting
to communicate this sort of thing goes on all the time.  That, e.g. Breton
has moved from the VSO of the older Brittonic langs to a SVO order and has,
alone among the Celtic langs, developed an indefinite article cannot be
dissociated IMO from the influence of its French neighbor.  So why has
English affected Welsh the same way?  Well, it did have a similar affect on
Cornish.  But Elizabeth I, in order to persuade the Welsh to accept the
Protestant religion and not be awkward like the Irish, ordered the Bible to
be translated into Welsh and this set a literary standard whose effects are
felt till today.  Also the Welsh tended to be less affected by English in
the Welsh speaking heartland and, having a literary standard, were able to
resist English influence.

All sorts of intercultural & acculturation factors come into play in the
development of natlangs; it seems to me that sampling to get significant
results, isolating out other factors like borrowing etc, is difficult
enough in itself.

>The sample also has to include all language types
>(eg., agglutinative vs. isolating; SOV vs. VOS; ergaive vs. nominative vs.
>active; etc).  There's an excellent discussion of this problem in Croft's
>book "Typologies and Universals".
Thanks - I might try to follow this up, if I get time in the not too
distant future.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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