Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

Syntactic differences

• In syntactic typology, we see other types of differences; some cases that involve the order of words and phrases:
• Whether a language has a fixed word-order or not
• What the fixed word-order of the language is in the first place
• Whether there have to be subject and object Noun Phrases in the first place

English Word Order

• One fact that is clear about English is that major constituents occur in a fixed order:
• Subject Verb Object (SVO)
• Other orders change the meaning; put differently
• The cat chased the dog; and
• The dog chased the cat.
• Describe different events altogether. In English, information about the Subject and the Object requires a fixed syntactic order
• Think carefully about e.g.
• The cat, the dog chased