Re: Heavy constituents in left-branching langs

on 1/7/07 3:17 AM, Henrik Theiling at theiling@ABSINT.COM wrote:

> Thus spoke Zarathustra.
>
> Errm, no, of course.  Verb last:
>
> Zarathustra thus spoke: ...
>
> I.e., have a full clause as in introduction to the quotation.
>
> **Henrik
This is what I meant by splitting it up into two sentences. Actually I'm not
so sure about this particular example - it might really have the same
structure as "Z said:" - but even if it were, I'd be afraid that if such a
circumlocution were the norm, the two parts would quickly get reanalyzed as
a simpler, unified, right-branching structure anyway (with the
meaning/syntactic role/existence of "thus" or whatever other word might be
used getting bleached away).

Josh Roth