Re: (chat) Yoda's word order

Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> Since 'finden' is the "information-carrying verb," the sentence is
> properly seen as SOV with a second position auxiliary, which is
> obligatory in main clauses for this tense/aspect combination. In that
> respect, it is not unlike Uto-Aztecan languages like Luiseño and
> Tohono O'odham, which must also place tense/aspect information in the
> second position of the sentence. The difference is that lexical
> (i.e., information-carrying) verbs in German may carry all of the
> tense/aspect information themselves for certain tense and aspect
> combinations and do not require auxiliary support in those cases.
Still, the majority of German sentences contain only one single
verb, so the multiverbal construction should be viewed as an
exception, not the rule.

Furthermore, the V2 rule (finite verb at second position in the
sentence) is so well-established an consistent in German that it
seems very much forced to squeeze it into a SOV cage.  To treat
the infinite verb like the "true" verb sounds like an Americanism to
me; seeing as English has very little typographical distinction
between finite and infinite verbs, the average American probably
considers the distinction far less important than a native speaker
of German.

Mark's homepage claims that "German is basically SOV, but a finite
verb (anything but a participle or an infinitive) appears after the
subject in a main clause."  This scheme seems to suggest that the
infinite verb is an invariant of German sentence structure, with
finite verbs occasionally appearing in weird places as an exception.
However, finite verbs are the invariant in German sentences (no
sentence is grammatically correct without a finite verb), while
infinite parts of the verbal phrase are the exception.

While the claim "All elephants are green except for the four-legged
ones" might be logically true (albeit weird), the claim that
"Elephants are *basically* green, except for the four-legged ones"
is definitely false, since it designates a wrong "normal state"
while treating the true normal state like an exception.


-- Christian Thalmann

Reply