Re: deeply embedded VSO nightmare

--- William Annis wrote:
        Possibly.  When I first designed the language, I gave it a
pronounced aversion to separating the V and the S.  Perhaps I could
weaken that a bit.  My tendency now would be to shift 'aldoven' out to
the front if it goes with 'lero.'
--- end of quote ---

That would be another way to deal with it. Most (all?) verb-initial natlangs allow fronting.

--- beginning of quote ---
 >There shouldn't be any problem with this, since I notice you have
 >case marking in your language.

        Yep.  In theory I could do almost anything to disambiguate,
but I feel that if I'm going to insist that the main word order is
VSO, and the modifiers follow the thingie modified, then there had
better be a good reason to go messing about with the word order.
--- end of quote ---

Disambiguation is as good a reason as any. All natlangs--or at least, all the ones I can
think of--have movement/rearrangement rules for dealing with 'heavy'
constituents. No natlang has a completely fixed word order.

Matt.

Matt Pearson
Department of Linguistics
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd
Portland, OR 97202 USA
ph:  503-771-1112 (x 7618)