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Re: typology of V-initial lgs

From:Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
Date:Monday, November 22, 1999, 11:43
dirk elzinga wrote:

>On Sun, 21 Nov 1999, Kristian Jensen wrote: > >> Nik Taylor wrote: >> >Interesting. AFAIK, there are no natlangs with postpositions and =
VSO
>> >order. >> >> They do exist, but are extremely rare. Yagua, the only surviving =
member
>> of the Peba-Yaguan languages spoken in the amazon basin of Peru is =
just
>> such a language. On the other side of the same continent is another >> called Guajajara of the Tupi-Guarani family. I wonder, is this a >> specifically South American phenomenon? > >Hmmm. Mayan languages are also V-initial, but they are prepositional. I >wonder if there's areal influence on the languages you mention as well, >where they were originally SOV or something, but shifted to V-initial. =
I
>just posted something in response to Nik about V-initial, =
postpositional
>languages in Southern Uto-Aztecan, where it's pretty clear that areal >influence from Mayan (and Zapotecan, IIRC) is responsible for the shift >to V-initial order.
I guess that may be the case for South-America languages. From what I=20 read, many of the South-American languages are verb-initial. But there=20 are quite a few verb final langs too like Quechua and the Yanomami = langs.=20 So I guess Yagua has undergone some areal influence, probably recieved=20 verb-initialness from neighboring langs since much of its word order=20 implies a verb-final language. This is what I have pictured for Boreanesian. The Boreanesians migrated=20 from Japan before sea levels rose over 10K years ago. Japanese, Korean,=20 and Ainu are all verb-final. So Boreanesian was perhaps a verb-final=20 language. But due to an areal influence from the surrounding = Austronesian=20 languages, Boreanesian is now a verb-initial language with a post- positional holdover from ancient times.
> >> Incidentally, Boreanesian is a type 8 language too. Dirk, I get the >> feeling that Tepa is a type 8 language too, no? > >Except for the attributive adjective following the head noun. Since >adjectives are really stative verbs, they are initial, and thus >modified nouns are really relative clauses; this means that Tepa has >head-internal relatives ... I'm getting dizzy. I'd better go lie down. >
Me too! ;) -kristian- 8)