Re: Greenberg's Word Order Universals

At 9:29 pm +0000 14/9/00, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>[snip]
>No, it means that if there is one of the numbers that has only
>unmarked forms, it's the singular. You can have any of these:
>
>  All nouns take marks for both singular and plural.
>
>  Some nouns have a marked singular, some have a marked plural, some
>  have both.
Like Welsh   :)

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At 7:00 pm -0400 14/9/00, Nik wrote:
>Marcus Smith wrote:
>> 6. All languages with dominant VSO order have SVO as an alternative or
>>as the
>> only alternative basic order.
>
>All?
Yes, one would like to see Greenberg's actual evidence for his 'universals'.

And to say that SVO may occur as an alternative does not IMHO tell us much.
In the VSO language I'm most familiar with, one might just as well say that
OVS occurs an alternative; or AVSO also occurs, where A = adverb, _or_
phrase acting as adverb (I was brought up calling such phrases "adverbial
phrases", but "prepositional phrases" seems to be the more common term now,
at least among American linguists).

It would be more helpful IMO to have identified conditions in which VSO
languages use alternate word orders.  The language I have in mind, of
course, is modern Welsh.  The normal, 'unmarked' sentence is VSO.  But if
you wish to mark _focus_, then the focus is fronted; this may sometimes be
the subject but, I guess, more often is not.

Many languages, e.g. German, are tpoic-fronting.  Focus-fronting seems to
be a lot less common.  Now if Greenberg had noticed that topic-fronting was
a tendency in languages where VSO is the normal word order, that would've
been interesting.

But (6) above IMHO leaves more questions unanswered than it answers.
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At 4:18 pm -0700 14/9/00, SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY wrote:
[...]
>
>Well, all from his study apparently.  I can't recall how big his sample
>was though.
Nor can I, tho I have read it somewhere.

>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.
Well, even if we take the 300 figure (and I'm darned sure Greenberg's
sample was not greater - 60 may well have been the actual figure), what
proportion is that set against all the languages still spoken on our globe
(wonder what the total figure is?), still less against all the languages
even spoken through all the millennia of human discourse.

How much credence would a statistician give to results obtained from
Greenberg's sampling?

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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