Re: Word Order in typology

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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