Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

Elsewhere

• Some languages are primarily head-final; e.g. Uzbek. Compare
• Rasul had read the book.
• Rasul kitob o’qidi
• Rasul book read AUX
• There’s a kind of “mirror-image” effect here (think trees…)

Structures

• S
• NP AuxP
• Rahul Aux VP
• had V NP
• read the book
• This is the English version….

Free Word Order

• Some languages do not require major constituents to appear in a fixed order
• Such languages are sometimes described as having free word order
• In such languages, participants in the event and subject, object etc. are identified by other means

Examples

• One language with free word order is Mapudungun, which is spoken in Chile and Argentina
• Here is a basic sentence:
• INche pefin metawe
• I see vessel
• ‘I see the vessel’

Word Orders

• In addition to allowing SVO sentences, all of the other possible arrangements are grammatical as well:
• INche metawe pefin. SOV
• Metawe iNche pefin. OSV
• Metawe pefin iNche OVS
• Pefin metawe iNche VOS
• Pefin iNche metawe VSO

Agreement and Free Word Order

• How are the grammatical roles of these noun phrases determined?
• Above the verb is given as
• pefin
• This verb actually has a lot of information in it:
• Pe-fi-n
• See-Object.Marker-1sS
• That is, the verb says that the subject is first person singular, and that there is a third person object.
• Thus the different word orders can be understood as expressing the same basic proposition