Re: Italian Particles

At 06:23 PM 4/21/2000 -0700, Sally Caves wrote:
>Sally Caves wrote:
>>
>> Tim Smith wrote:
>> >
>
>> > 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.
>
>Is it?  Did it?  Where can I get a look at Kixkaryana?
Unfortunately, Hixkaryana is one of the innumerable indigenous languages of
the Western Hemisphere that will probably be extinct within a few
generations because of the inexorable advance of "Western civilization".
(Unless it's one of the lucky few that have enough native speakers to keep
them viable, like Navajo or Quechua, which I very much doubt.  If it were
in that class, it would have been "discovered" long before the 1970's.)  So
we'll never know what its "natural" evolutionary course would have been.
It's a Carib language spoken somewhere in the Amazon basin; it and a few
other languages in the same general area (not all close relatives
genetically, so it's obviously an areal feature) are the only "known" (that
is, known to Western linguists) languages with dominant object-initial word
order.

All I know about it is a couple of paragraphs in Bernard Comrie's _Language
Universals and Linguistic Typology_, but in Comrie's bibliography there are
four references:

Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1977: Word order universals and the existence of OVS
languages.  _Linguistic Inquiry_ 8, 590-9.

Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1979: _Hixkaryana_.  Lingua Descriptive Studies I.
Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1985: _Hixkaryana and linguistic typology.  Dallas,
TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Derbyshire, Desmond C. & Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1981: Object initial
languages.  _International Journal of American Linguistics_ 47, 192-214.

>What if certain brain structures dictate speech patterns?  I have
>wondered
>about that.
I think so, at least to some extent.  (In that, at least, I'm a Chomskyan,
although on the whole I find the functional-typological approach to
linguistics more interesting than the generativist approach.  (But I don't
regard the two as mutually exclusive, as I said at perhaps excessive length
a few weeks ago.))  Of course, since I gather the Teonaht speakers aren't
exactly human, there's no reason why they should have the same brain
structures.  But I also think that there are probably functional reasons
for generally putting topic before comment; other things being equal, it's
probably easier to parse a sentence if the speaker tells you up front what
it is they're talking about.

- Tim