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Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses

From:Matthew Pearson <matthew.pearson@...>
Date:Monday, November 19, 2001, 21:21
--- John Cowan wrote:
> Hebrew?!?! Ok, that's out of the blue!
Not at all, it's just one of the large collection of Semitic/Celtic symmetries, of which VSO is the most obvious. Personally, I suspect a very old Sprachbund effect either in Spain or just possibly Southwest Britain. --- end of quote --- I'm suspicious of this kind of explanation. After all, having inflected prepositions is a common property of verb-initial languages (or languages that pattern as if they were verb-initial, as in the case of Hebrew). Malagasy has inflected prepositions: amiko "with me" aminao "with you" aminy "with him/her/them" Malagasy shares other properties with Celtic and Hebrew, such as determiners and the use of a "construct state" type construction for marking possession, among others. I doubt if anybody would want to suggest that Malagasy (which originated in Southern Borneo, after all) is part of the Hebrew-Celtic Sprachbund. And if it isn't, then we must assume that this cluster of structural properties can arise independently in verb-initial languages in different parts of the world. But if you allow that assumption, then positing a Sprachbund effect to explain the Semitic-Celtic connection doesn't buy you much--especially since there doesn't seem to be any evidence of shared vocabulary between Semitic and Celtic to suggest prolonged contact. (This isn't to say that there wasn't *any* early contact between Semitic- and Celtic-speaking peoples. Given their geographic proximity, it's quite likely that there was.) To me a structural explanation seems much more likely than a historical one. That seemingly disparate morpho-syntactic properties often cluster around a particular word order type has been known since Greenberg's work in the early 60s. If you compare, say, Turkish and Quechua (both SOV languages), you find that they share an extraordinarily large number of features: Postpositions, case-marking suffixes on nouns (except in the case of the subject, which triggers agreement on the verb), morphological causatives, pro-drop, non-finite verb forms used in embedded clauses, prenominal adjectives, prenominal possessors (which trigger agreement on the possessed noun), relatively free order of subject and object, topic- and focus-fronting, tense/aspect and number marked by suffixes, etc. etc. etc.. It would be strange to argue that these parallels are due to some sort of historical contact between speakers of (proto-)Turkish and (proto-)Quechua. For some as yet unknown reason, our men! tal grammars seem to be set up to statistically favour certain constructions over others, depending on the basic word order of our language. Matt. Matthew Pearson Department of Linguistics Reed College 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd Portland, OR 97202 503 771 1112 x 7618

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John Cowan <jcowan@...>