Re: deeply embedded VSO nightmare

 William Annis <annis@...> wrote:

> ler-o   na  tath  daip-oth       fid-?al  aldove-n
> go-PRES the woman walk-PRES=PART fast-ADV home-ACC
> could be either
>   (1)"the woman walking quickly is going home" or
>   (2)"the woman walking quickly home is going."
or indeed
    (3) the woman walking is going home quickly


This degree of ambiguity is not unusual in natlangs, generally the
context is sufficient to sort things out. The next line of defense
is supplied by suprasegmental features, that is speed and rhythm of
delivery, stress, emphasis etc.

Finally you can use relative pronouns or personal pronouns to disambiguate
the sentence and possibly also emphasise parts of it. eg. if "nat" means
"she" you could say :

(1) na tath daipoth fid?al, lero nat aldoven
(2) na tath daipoth fid?al aldoven, lero nat
(3) na tath daipoth, lero nat fid?al aldoven

I suppose this is a case of "fronting", bringing the important element
of the sentence forward to make it more prominent. If you feel the above
breaks you syntax rules, use your equivalent of "it is" or "it was"
at the start, followed by a relative pronoun i.e.

"'Tis the woman walking quickly WHO is going home"
"'Tis the woman walking quickly home WHO is going"
"'Tis the woman walking WHO's going home quickly"

Of course the tendency over time is for the emphatic construction to
become normal, for the "'Tis/'Twas" word to degenerate from a full verb
marking number, person, tense, mood etc into an unchangable syntax marker,
and for the relative force of the pronoun to get forgotten too. That's
one way that a VSO language can become superficially SVO.

Take a look at the Celtic languages, especially Irish which have the
sort of VSO syntax you describe. The Semitic langs are also basically
VSO (perhaps not modern Hebrew) so some of the Arabists on the list should
be able to help you out.

Keith

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