Re: Word Order in typology

Sorry for the delay in responding to this; I've been swamped
with work this week (CLS is coming out with its next publication,
and reading levels for classes and personal research are unusually high).
So, if I make mention of facts that others have already noted, please
ignore this.

Also, Chris, could you please write in paragraphs? I find it much
easier to read things which are not monolithic chunks of text! :)

From:    Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
> Looking at Wikipedia
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_%28grammar%29), there doesn't seem
> to be any rigorous definition of subject here. Similarly for the Object.
You should probably be aware that Wikipedia isn't exactly the place one
goes to for discussions of linguistic phenomena (or, indeed, much else)
of a technical nature.

> In what sense are universals based on SVO etc meaningful, if the
> definitions of subject and object vary from language to language and in
> fact seem quite vague?
Greenberg never intended his typologizing to be anything more than
a statistical guide to how languages tend to behave. The importance
of this is not so much to describe how this language fits into that
pidgeon-hole, but to act as checks on the kinds of theoretical
structures and entities that linguists posit.  The real value
of categorizing languages into SVO, SOV, VSO, etc. is that it revealed
generalizations about generalized phrase structures, since it turned
out that languages with SOV had a much greater than chance likelihood
of also being postpositional, and inversely with VSO.  As to the actual
definitions of subject or object, Greenberg used a pretheoretical
eyeball approach based on a raft of different criteria (largely similar
to those of the Hopper article I mentioned some time back), which was
as necessary a starting point as having axioms in mathematics, even
if one may later abandon such criteria. (You are presumably aware that
Goedel's proof shows that even in mathematics one must ultimately posit
an infinite number of axioms to explain all phenomena in that logical
system.)

So, basically it seems that you've confused a descriptive, nontheoretical
enterprise for an axiomatic, theoretical one.

> If there is no concrete definition then I
> have all the leeway I like to argue that any language doesn't break the
> universals related to Subject-Verb-Object ordering, so the universals
> are in practice useless.
You're really oversimplifying things here, I think because you're
not taking into account that subject and object properties are *relations*
rather than primitives.  What's important is not whether there is a universal
primitive "subject" or "object", but whether there is evidence for such a
relation in a given language.  And there *are* concrete criteria for subject
and object properties. Among other things:

-- fixed word order position in a hierarchical constituency structure
-- subjects can be the antecedent of reflexive pronouns
-- subjects induce interclausal pivots
-- the locus of raising constructions
-- the locus of control constructions

This is really a much more complicated field than your prose admits of.
(One great article showing this fact that I have recently read is Joan
Bresnan's _Linear Order vs. Syntactic Rank: Evidence from Weak Crossover_
which can be found here:
<ftp://www-lfg.stanford.edu/pub/lfg/papers/bresnan/bresnan-1994-0414.ps>)

> I don't mean to disparage anyone who's a
> professional linguist, but I find a lot of linguistics to be a load of
> complete rubbish, or at least something strictly intuitive pretending to
> be rigorous. If you can't define something properly you should be
> honest, rather than pretending that your art is a science. And if you
> can define it in such a way as to make it meaningful as a general term,
> rather than a term whose meaning changes from language to language, you
> should do so. :)
(1) The object of study is not deterministic like mathematics, but
probabilistic, and to make this even more difficult, our understanding
of the cognitive and neurological foundations of language is so profoundly
lacking that we cannot even begin to say interesting things about why, say,
weak-crossover might work one way in English and another way in Palauan,
and yet another in Malayalam. We must wait on the neurologists for decades
or centuries for that.

(2) *Some* linguistic theorizing *is* undoubtedly rubbish -- but then,
that's a tautological comment, true in all empirical sciences.  When the
great debates over the architecture of the solar system were going on in the
1500s, even the Copernicans who eventually won had to add epicycles to
explain certain kinds of movement patterns in the heavens.  And at the
time, it seemed plausible, since great empiricists like Tycho Brahe
(and here the analogue to typological studies in linguistics is salient)
couldn't verify the heliocentric theories by pretheoretical observational
methods.

> On the other hand, Argument roles I would argue do have meaning that
> doesn't change from language to language,
Not so.  A brief look at Navaho morphosyntax suggests that agentivity
is a gradient phenomenon as well, highly dependent on animacy hierarchies.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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