Re: Italian Particles

At 07:51 PM 4/16/2000 -0700, Sally Caves wrote:
>DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
>
>> Wasn't there discussion quite a while back that French was heading in this
>> direction with the increased use of the independent pronouns in sentences
>> like:
>>
>> Moi, je pense.
>> Toi, tu penses.
>> Lui, il pense.
>> Elle, elle pense.
>> Nous, nous pensons.
>> Vous, vous pensez.
>> Eux, ils pensent.
>> Elles, elles pensent.
>>
>> or sentences like:
>>
>> Les chaises, elles sont très belles.
>> Le fromage, il est délicieux.
>> Ma mère, elle pense que...
>
>There may have been, and if so I'm pleased and amazed... Teonaht
>is doing something like this, but mostly because it's tired of its
>OSV structure.  It has a special "pronoun" which is actually an
>emphasized person particle:
>
>Yry firrimby (ry).  As for me, grateful I.  Instead of:
>        Firrimby ry.
>
>Yryi il jentwar ry cosa.  As for me, the door I closed.  Instead of
>just:
>                Il jentwar ry cosa.
>
>
>Likewise:
>
>Le massalan androfaith twav.  The chairs, beautiful they.  Instead of:
>                androfaith le massalan.
>
>With most active verbs, though, the T. requires that there be a
>resumption of the pronoun just before the verb.  It can't let go of
>final subject-verb syntax.
>
>I suppose I will have to figure out just how this is working to create
>emphasis, but for now it's an option.  I'm sorta pleased with it
>because it's one of several few things that "happened" to Teonaht
>naturally instead of synthetically... it has the feel of a real
>development, along with the prefixed tense particles of ten years
>ago.
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.
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.

- Tim