Re: tense marking and typology

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Jim Henry wrote:

> On 9 Jun 99, at 15:32, J.Barefoot wrote:
>
> > I'm trying to come up with a pragmatic tense marking system for Asiteya
> > (or Astya, both tenetative names, really just the word for "the
> > language"), where different word orders mean different tenses. Is there
> > any precedent for this? Does it violate typology rules completely to allow
> > SVO, VSO and SOV in the same language (even if the language is,
>
> Well, English, French and German all change word-order to change
> from indicative to questioning, so I don't see why not.
>
If I remember correctly, Spocanian marks tense with word order,
and Roland Tweehuysen's reasoning about the reasonableness of
that feature was exactly like yours.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt