Re: Word Order in typology

Okay, so the example didn't fit exactly. :) I know that its not perfect,
but I was trying to think of an example.My point was, if you remove one
then nothing proved using that definition holds anymore... so in a
similar way its unsound to build general linguistic theory which is
supposed to hold for all languages on notions like subject which haven't
been shown to be applicable to all languages. If you want to hedge:

"Assuming that subject is meaning in a language, .... and the word order
is typically SOV, then...."

then that's fine, but without explicitly mentioning that assumption the
whole thing seems unsound.

BTW... I used the word axiom, because one of my lecturers did actually
use to refer to those rules as the group axioms... or I'm pretty sure he
did. That was a couple of years ago... *shrugs*