Re: Greenberg's universals for SVO languages & Caos Pidginruff-sketch

Tom Wier wrote:

>> -- case is less common, and when present, usually doesn't not follow an
>> ergative pattern.
>
>Right -- although I believe the figure is about 25% that show some
ergativity,
>whether morphological (like Basque) or syntactic (like Dyirbal).
According to Comrie, Dyirbal is not SVO.  The examples Comrie gives of Basque
do not show an SVO pattern either.

>> -- often have definite articles (OV languages tend not to).
>
>...or more precisely, grammaticalize definiteness.  Mam, a language I worked
>on, for example, assumes that words will be definite, and marks only singular
>and plural indefinite articles.  (Mam is VSO)
Well, VSO is not SVO -- the two orders do have different typologies in this
respect.  SVO does tend to have definite articles, while the other orders tend
to express definiteness with no articles (like Mam) or with demonstratives
(like Comanche, IIRC).

>> -- conjunctions is of the form "X and X" rather than "and X and X" or "X
and
X
>> and", the former is rare, the later is (possibly) unattested.
>
>What about "X and and X" and "and X X and"?  Greek has the former:
>> -- prefixes are common for tense, case, etc.  There are always some
suffixes
>> though.
>
>Always? I would say that has more to do with their being in one of the
>midpoints between pure analysis (i.e., isolating languages) and pure
synthesis
>(purely agglutinating languages).
I have read in more than one book, and been told by more than one professor,
that all languages have a least a few suffixes.  In languages with lots of
prefixes, these suffixes are often derivational rather than inflectional.

  My friend once joked that he'd hate to have
>to learn a purely fusional language, where the logical extreme might be
something
>like "po" encapsulates everything written by Gauss or something -- literally
all
>the words.
Hmm.  Then a purely agglutinative language taken to the logical extreme could
express the same thing with a single word that's thousands of syllables long.
Gee, I hope the stressed syllable is the first, otherwise it would be hard to
anticipate the word's rythm.

>> -- Subordinate clauses are often finite (e.g., "I want he goes" rather than
"I
>> want him to go").
>
>Hmm. I suppose that's true, but Greek is a counterexample to this again:
So is English. ;-)

>However, virtually all languages have equi-nounphrase deletion, as with
infinitive
>constructions.  There is one area of the world that doesn't:  the Balkans,
>and it's not surprisingly a Sprachbund there.  In those languages, you
have to
>say "I want that I go" instead of "I want go" or "I want to go", which are
more
>in keeping with the universal.
Many polysynthetic languages do this as well.  One theory is that in these
polysynthetic languages, all the arguments must be expressed as a morpheme on
the verb.  If anything were to be deleted, the sentence would be made
ungrammatical.

Chickasaw has the very interesting feature in that the agreement is
required to
delete when the two subjects corefer, but the pronoun is optional.  So you can
have "He wants go" or "He wants he go" but never "He wants he goes".  To those
who care: yes, that is a nominative pronoun accompanying a non-agreeing,
non-finite verb -- a nice counter-example to part of current case theory.

>> Of course, as somebody pointed out in another message, universals are just
>> statistics.  I know of no absolute universals except things like "All
>> languages have vowels".
>
>Some have claimed even that's not true.  I read once, somewhere, that there's
>a language in Papua New Guinea that has no phonemic vowels -- although I
>suspect this to be apocryphal, or a misinterpretation.
But the presence of epinthetic vowels makes it conform to a strict
interpretation of the universal.









===============================
Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
  -- Kenneth Hale
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