Re: deeply embedded VSO nightmare

Hi!

kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET writes:
> Josh Roth <Fuscian@...> wrote :
>
>  There's something weird about VSO, or something I don't understand
>  anyway. They told us in LIN 101 that a verb and its object form a verb phrase
>  together, which makes sense in SVO, SOV, VOS, and OVS languages, where the
>  object and the verb are actually next to each other (and therefore you don't
>  get ambiguities like the one above). But in VSO and OSV they're not,
...
> Well I think that the verb phrase is just a technique for analysis, more or
> less useful according to your purpose, not a language universal.
I read in a thesis (forgot the name, I think `Phrase structure in
Tagalog' by some author) that a language in which verb and object form
a verb phrase is called a configurational language.

Apart from the fact that the word order can still be changed (e.g. in
German), languages that are not configurational would not even have
the slightest difficulty in using VSO oder OSV orders.  The author of
that thesis claimed that Tagalog was a non-configurational language, I
think.

To speak of German, verb + object can form infinitves with OV order,
making it configurational (as English, too):

   `to read a book' = `ein Buch lesen'

But still, when you add the subject, the order changes totally and in
various ways:

   Ich lese ein Buch.          (SVO)

or in a question:
   Lese ich ein Buch?          (VSO)

or in a sub-ordinate clause:
  ..., dass ich ein Buch lese. (SOV)

**Henrik