Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

General Patterns

• The general pattern- one that accounts for part of the word order facts- is that in English, the heads of phrases precede the complements of the heads
• Recall that we have phrases like XP with head X
• In English we find [X YP], not YP X
• E.g. PP: [to [the store]]; VP [eat [an apple]]

Another way of putting this

• The trees we draw for constituent structures are like mobiles
• Linear orders respect these structures: lines cannot cross
• VP
• V NP
• eat N
• apples
• Later we’ll see languages that have this tree structure, but a different order for the elements

• *[[the apples] eat]
• Ok: [ eat [the apples]]