Re: Italian Particles

At 07:56 PM 4/19/2000 -0700, Sally Caves wrote:
>Tim Smith wrote:
>> It sounds to me as if what's happening is that Teonaht is "giving in" to
>> the very widespread cross-linguistic tendency for the topic to go at the
>> beginning of the sentence, or as close to the beginning as other
>> constraints allow.  (I say "widespread" but not "universal", because I know
>> of at least one clear counterexample: Malagasy, where the topic generally
>> goes at the end.)  Thus, in "free word order" languages (which really means
>> languages in which word order is determined by pragmatic rather than
>> syntactic factors), the topic generally goes first, and in the great
>> majority of "fixed word order" languages (where the order is syntactically
>> determined), the subject goes first (the subject having a higher
>> probability of being the topic than any other constituent).
>>
>> There's a reason why languages with dominant OSV order are extremely rare.
>
>What's that reason, Tim?
The reason is the tendency to put the topic first.  (Which, depending on
how you define "topic", may be even more nearly universal than I thought --
see Matt's comment on what I said about Malagasy.)  In languages that have
the freedom to move constituents around based on discourse roles, putting
the topic first is straightforward.  In languages that don't have that
freedom (because they need a fixed constituent order to mark syntactic
roles), you can't always put the topic first, but you can approximate that
by putting the subject first, because, more often than not, the subject
_is_ the topic.  (Well, maybe not "more often than not", but certainly more
often than any other constituent.)  So, if you need a rule that assigns
every syntactic role to a fixed position (as you do in languages like
English that don't have some other means of marking syntactic roles, such
as case marking), by far the most common such rule is to put the subject
first.

Obviously that's an oversimplification.  For one thing, there's more than
one kind of topic, as Matt pointed out; a sentence can have both a
"sentence-level topic" and a "discourse-level topic" which may or may not
be the same.  For another, obviously even languages with very rigid
constituent-order rules, like English, do have ways of bending those rules
to mark discourse roles -- for instance, left-dislocation of a
direct-object topic, as in "bagels, I like".

>Why can't the human brain be perfectly capable
>of
>thinking object first instead of subject first?
>
>        Rain, I like it.  Small step to:  Rain I like.
>        The door, I closed it.  The T say:  The door I closed.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.  You're fronting the object _when
it's the topic_.  It's only when this becomes the default, unmarked order,
so that the object comes first whether or not it's the topic, that it
begins to sound "unnatural".
>
>When they want to emphasize who it is closes the door or likes the rain,
>they
>say:
>
>        Me, rain I like.  Me, the door I closed.
Here, the subject is the topic, and you're fronting it.
>
>Want the verb emphasized?  Closing of door I did.  (Where "of" is a
>"respect"
>particle).
Here it sounds like the verb is the topic, and again it's fronted.

There's something else happening here too, at least as I read these
sentences.  Of course since I'm only reading them, and not hearing you say
them, I may be reading patterns of stress and intonation into them that
aren't actually there.  But it looks to me as if there may also be another
common pattern showing up here, in addition to the near-universal
"topic-first" pattern: the "preverbal focus" pattern.  The focus (if any)
is the constituent that receives the most emphasis.  It's the most salient
part of the new information that the speaker is trying to get across,
whereas the topic is old information, the thing that you're talking about.
It's a very common pattern (though not a near-universal like the
"topic-first" pattern) to put the focus immediately before the verb.  If
your second subject-first example is meant to be read as "me, the DOOR I
closed", where "me" is the topic and "the door" is the focus, then you're
following this pattern, at least in that sentence.  (I'm counting the
resumptive pronoun "I" as a clitic that's really part of the verb complex,
not an independent constituent.)  And from what little I know of Teonaht, I
have the impression that it lends itself very well to sentences that follow
that pattern.
>
>I wish I could find some info on OSV languages, so I could see how they
>function in real life.  Teonaht is so entrenched, and the OSV structure
>is
>so much a part of elite written language that I'm not going to change
>it;
>but Menarilish will be more specifically SOV.  What the Teonaht write
>and
>what they say in the pub are different things.
FWIW, my guess is that those few natlangs that do have default
object-initial order (e.g., Hixkaryana) may be going through some sort of
temporary transitional stage, and that, left to itself, such a language
would probably evolve out of this stage fairly quickly.  ("Quickly" of
course meaning relative to language evolution in general, which even at its
fastest is still so slow that it's usually almost imperceptible within a
human lifetime.)  But if it happened to acquire a writing system and
develop a literary tradition while in that transitional phase, maybe that
could cause a word order that would otherwise have been unstable and
short-lived to be artificially frozen, at least in the "high" literary
register of the language.  (Prescriptive grammar tends to be a side effect
of literary traditions.  But prescriptive grammar has only a very limited
effect on the everyday spoken language.)  Does that sound like a plausible
explanation of what's happening in Teonaht?

>
>> The fact that this drift away from OSV order has happened "naturally" to
>> Teonaht seems to suggest that your subconscious mind is responding to this
>> tendency, even contrary to your conscious intent.
>
>It seemed fairly conscious... I just couldn't THINK object first.  I
>couldn't
>give directions to the cat in T.
>
>Sally
>--
>============================================================
>SALLY CAVES
>scaves@frontiernet.net
>http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves (bragpage)
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>"The gods have retractible claws."
>                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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