Re: Word Order in typology

Please read the book Atoms of Language by Mark Baker
who's a big name in linguistics, and is one of the
proponents of Principles and Parameters.

 Basically, in these languages where you say the
"subject" is not a meaningful category, Baker and
other linguists who work within P&P would probably
argue that there is a parameter which can be set to
"on or off" (metaphorically) that determines whether a
language has a "subject relation" or not. Then, if a
language does, the various types of ways a subject can
be realised will be other parameters that can be
turned on and off. On pages 183 of the book, there's a
hypothetical list of these parameters and their
various settings.

  I really think that Linguistics is rather more
scientific than you seem to; it just means that the
theories are theories not Laws. This whole thing about
"language laws" is misleading I suppose. I would argue
that the tendencies that do exist are rather widely
followed in human languages and do seem to be somehow
hardwired in our brain. There are things that are not
immediately intuitive, and that's the object of
linguistics. At least that's what I feel, being a
linguistics major and all.

  Also, in linguistics a subject relation has not
actually been defined unambiguously defined yet, as
far as I know. That's one of the debates in syntax.

  Elliott

--- Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
wrote:

> 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.
> 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? Looking further at
>
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASubject.htm,
> the definition given seems to be a list of
> conditions that might
> possibly be satisfied by a subject and thus rather
> useless (and there
> are certainly languages in which this grammatical
> role does not play a
> (major) part), and indeed in the end falls back on
> "The identification
> of the subject relation may be further confirmed by
> finding significant
> overlap with similar subject relations previously
> established in other
> languages." So basically a subject is what other
> languages call a
> subject... which leads me back to the question in my
> other mail... what
> use does such typology have? 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. 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. :)
>  On the other hand, Argument roles I would argue do
> have meaning that
> doesn't change from language to language, as do
> topic and focus... how
> the case system, word order etc separate out (or
> not) various argument
> roles varies from language to language and from verb
> to verb, but when I
> talk of an Agent, the idea is easily communicable no
> matter what
> language you speak, and you don't need to know a
> massive amount of
> linguistics to have it explained to you. Structures
> built on top of
> concepts like these, which do vary from language to
> language, don't seem
> to me to be the right areas of study for universals,
> since their exact
> meaning and scope is far from independent of the
> language under study.
>
> > Chris írta: "[Why] don't we say AVP instead of SVO
> etc?"
> >
> > The terms "subject" and "object" deal with
> syntactic roles. OTOH, "agent"
> > and "patient" deal with argument roles. The terms
> are not
> > interchangeable,
> > since in many Western languages at least, subjects
> can be agents,
> > patients,
> > or experiencers (even tho they're marked with
> different cases-- but
> > that's a
> > different story altogether!).
> > Trebor
> >
>

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