Re: typology of V-initial lgs

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)