Word order

In der hier vorgelegten empirisch-vergleichenden Studie wird die Verb-Zweit-Stellung im Rätoromanischen untersucht und gezeigt, dass eine Varietät des Rätoromanischen, das Bündnerromanische, ebenso wie das Deutsche über eine strenge Verb-Zweit-Stellungseigenschaft verfügt. Damit unterscheidet sich das Bündnerromanische deutlich von allen übrigen modernen romanischen Sprachen. Ein Vergleich mit dem Alt- und Mittelfranzösischen, für das meist auch eine Verb-Zweit-Eigenschaft angenommen wird, zeigt außerdem, dass auch hier fundamentale Unterschiede existieren.

Theoretical and methodological aspects of spoken word order are considered, using Russian data as a basis for discussion. A number of major theoretical and empirical issues are addressed in detail, including the units within which the order is determined, the role of intonation, the syntactic or cognitive categories in which the order is formulated, and syntactic features important for word order that are peculiar to spoken language. Most of the discussion concerns one-unit messages roughly corresponding to simple sentences, but examples of clause ordering corresponding to subordinate sentences are also included. Comparisons with other languages are drawn when appropriate.

The research presented here examines two features of word order in the Aramaic and Hebrew documents from the Judean desert refuge caves: (a) subject-predicate > predicate-subject order (in verbal clauses); and (b) predicate (or infinitive)-complement order. It appears that the word order in the legal documents – both Aramaic and Hebrew – resembles the order in the eastern type of Official Aramaic, as described by E. Y. Kutscher: (a) the verb can either precede or follow the subject; (b) the predicate (or infinitive) can precede or follow its complements. The letters, however, show the “western” word order, the one accepted as the usual word order in Semitic languages, as represented in the western type of Official Aramaic, as well as in Old Aramaic, classical biblical Hebrew, and rabbinic Hebrew: (a) the verb precedes the subject; and (b) the predicate or infinitive precedes its complements. Namely, the legal documents follow an (eastern) legal tradition, and therefore do not reflect the word order of their scribes’ native tongue (Aramaic or Hebrew). The letters, on the other hand, are not bound to old traditions, and therefore reflect, to some extent, the natural languages of Judea between the first and the second revolts.

This paper presents two optimalizations of standard parsing techniques applied to Czech as a representative of a free word order language with rich morphology. Our approach is based on features that take advantage of particular knowledge of language specific properties. The first method involves a special type of merging possible due to the agreement fulfillment. Another use of language specific features lies in the exploitation of verb valency frames for probabilistic ordering of parsing output.

Bilingual code switching within sentences (as in “The towel roja was dirty”) is often observed in bilingual communities. The present study addressed two issues. First, what is the nature of the grammatical rules that underlie code switching? Second, how do bilingual speakers acquire such rules? We addressed the first issue by obtaining judgments of the grammaticality of four types of sentences containing code-switched words. Judgments of acceptability seemed to be based on two rules: (1) Code switching can occur only when the code-switched words are positioned in accord with the rules for which they are approriate lexical items; (2) code switching within word boundaries is considered ungrammatical. We addressed the second issue by exploring the effects of age and code switching experience on the grammatical judgments of bilingual children and adults. Extensive code-switching experience did not seem to be necessary for bilingual speakers to know the grammatical constraints of code switching. This suggests that the constraints of code switching are based on the integration of the grammars of the two code-switched languages rather than on the creation of a third grammar. There were developmental changes in the judgments made to the sentences. All aged subjects found sentences that violated the word-order rule (1 above) unacceptable. However, the youngest children (8- to 10-year-olds) found mixing within a word acceptable. This developmental change could be due to a change in the grammar of code switching, in the ability to make metalinguistic judgments, or in the child's general knowledge about the nature of languages.

The attempts to explain constructions by Cognitivist Linguistics are usually based on excessively schematic patterns, due to the lexicalist nature of Cognitivism. The aim of this article is double: on the one hand, we will try to prove that word order phenomena work like radial categories. Hence Cognitivism can provide a wide range of interpretations and interesting ideas about them. On the second hand, we wish to state that there exists a deep and significative relationship between Grammar and Cognition, as well as between use and syntax.

This study discusses lexical preferences as a factor affecting the word order variation in Dutch verbal clusters. There are two grammatical word orders for Dutch two-verb clusters, with no clear meaning difference. Using the method of collostructional analysis, I find significant associations between specific verbs and word orders, and argue that these associations must be encoded in the lexicon as lexical preferences. In my data, the word orders also show some semantic associations, indicating that there might be a meaning difference after all. Based on these findings, I conclude that both word orders are stored in the lexicon as constructions.

Klasik Türk nesir edebiyatında ayrı bir yeri olan Ta-zarru'-nâme Sinan Paşa'nın hayatının son döneminde kaleme aldığı üç Türkçe eserinden ilkidir. Nesir edebiyatımız söz konusu edilirken adından bahsedilmeden geçilemeyecek olan çalışma, kaynakların estetik nesrin en önemli ürünü olarak ifade ettiği bir eserdir. Tazarru'-nâme ahlâkî, didaktik, aynı zamanda tarikat ve tasavvuf yolunun hakikatlerini öğreten bir eser olmanın yanında bu konuların anlatılış biçimi yönüyle de pek çok eserden farklı özelliklere sahiptir. Çalışmanın ilk makalesinde eseri farklı kılan özelliklerden birinin onun anlatım biçimi olduğu, eseri oluşturan söz düzeninin ikili (simetrik) yapısı üzerinde durulmuştu. Tazarru'-nâme'nin baştan sona simetrik yapılarla yazıldığı ve yapıların çeşitleri ve nitelikleri ele alınmıştı. Bir önceki çalışmada yapıların esere katkıları ve onu değerli kılan yönlerine vurgu yapıldı 1. Bu yazıda ise Tazarru'-nâme'yi oluşturan yapıların eseri sanatsal yönden güçlü kılan özellikleri tespit edilip bu yapıların nesir cümlelerini şiirsel öğelerle nasıl donattığı açıklanmaya çalışılacaktır. Estetik nesir ürünleri incelendiğinde şiir ile nesir cümleleri arasındaki farkın gittikçe azaldığı gözlen-mektedir. Şiire ait birçok özellik, şiir araçları vasıtasıyla nesir cümlelerine aktarılır. Tazarru'-nâme'de kullanılan simetrik yapılar, şiirsel özelliklerin esere aktarılmasında bir araç görevindedir. Eserin anlatımındaki estetik düzey bu simetrik yapılarla eserde var olabilmişlerdir. Bu bakımdan eseri oluşturan simetrik yapıların özelliklerinin tespit edil-mesi aynı zamanda şiirsel özelliklerin esere nasıl aktarıldığı-nın bulunmasına ve eserin sanat yönünün ortaya konma-sına da yardımcı olacaktır. Çalışmada ele alınan konu Sinan Paşa ve Tazarru'-nâme'ye has olmayıp estetik nesir kapsamına giren edebiyat ürünlerinde de bu tür kullanımlar bulunmaktadır. Bu yüzden çalışmada ulaşılan sonuçların aynı zamanda estetik
A B S T R A C T Tazarru'nâme is the first book of three Turkish works, Sinan Pasha wrote up in the last period of his life, has a distinct place in classical Turkish prose literature. While we are talking about prose literature it is a work that can not be passed without mentioning, expressed by sources as the most important product of aesthetic prose. It is a moral, didactic book at the same time teaches the truths of the religious order and mystic way. It has a different style than many works when these subjects is mentioning. In the first article of the study, it was emphasized that one of the different characteristics of the work is, its form of expression, and the dual (symmetrical) structure of the composition. Tazarru'-nâme was written from the begining to the end with symmetrical construction, and the types and qualities of the sutructure were discussed. Contribution of symmetrical structures and sructure aspects that make the book worthwhile were emphasized with previous article. In this paper the symmetrical structures of Tazarru'-nâme are determined by their powerful artistic features, and it will be attempted to explain how these structures furnish the prose with poetic elements. When the product of aesthetic prose are examined, it is observed that the differences between poetry and prose is gradually decreasing. Many features of poetry are transmitted to prose through poetry tools. The symmetrical constructions used in Tazarru'-nâme are a vehicle for transferring poetic features. The aesthetic level of the expression of the book has existed in with these symmetrical constructions. In this regard, to determine the characteristics of symmetric structures of work also will help to have transferred to trace how the poetic features. It will also help to reveal the artistic direction of the work.

Unless you’ve been living in a galaxy far, far away, you’ll know that 4th May is celebrated by fans as Star Wars Day – playing on the catchphrase “may the force be with you”, where the change of a single sound segment – at the end of the word “force” – gives a different word (known in linguistics as a minimal pair).
Language matters in the Star Wars universe. Interspecies communication is addressed by droids like C-3PO fluent in over 6 million forms of communication, and by an intergalactic lingua franca, Galactic Basic (English to film-goers). Most characters display multilingualism in the form of mutual passive bilingualism – understanding the languages of their interlocutor, but continuing to speak their own. Notably, though, the code mixing and translanguaging practices which are widespread in our real world are not reflected – not even in that marvellous multilingual marketplace of Mos Eisley Cantina.
[...]

The Automated Working Memory Assessment battery was designed to assess verbal and visuospatial passive and active working memory processing in children and adolescents. The aim of this paper is to present the adaptation and validation of the AWMA battery to Argentinean Spanish-speaking children aged 6 to 11 years. Verbal subtests were adapted and pilot tested on a small sample (n = 26). A validation study was conducted including 6-, 8- and 11-year-old children (n = 210). All subtests presented an increase in difficulty as the number of to-be-remembered items raised, and showed high Cronbach's α values. Regarding validity, all subtests had medium to high and significant correlations among them, and with two external measures of working memory (Picture Span and Word Order) and an executive function task (Tower of London); correlations with Block Design were low and non-significant. We conclude that the adapted AWMA can be considered a valid and reliable battery of working memory in Argentinean Spanish-speaking children.►A high internal consistency (Cronbach's α) was observed for all AWMA tests. ►Correlations among all the tests showed they were tapping the same construct. ►Convergent and discriminant validity of the WMA were established. ►The adapted AWMA can be considered a valid and reliable battery of working memory.

English is an SVO (Subject, Verb, Object) word order language. This canonical SVO pattern is the default unmarked word-order configuration typical of English, which makes English to be classified under the typology of SVO languages. However, driven by the major purpose of language as an instrument of human communication and social interaction, and as a semantic system for making meanings, addressors sometimes depart in their discourse from this basic canonical order of constituents where a grammaticalized system like inversion takes place, resulting in inverted constructions. Through testing and developing the Degree of Focus Hypothesis, proposed by Huffman (1993), this study, which employed a mixed methods research design, sought to explore the communicative and semantic values of inversion; and the pragmalinguistc functions of preposing, i.e. clause-initial adjuncts, to the pragmatic process of communication. The study confirmed the Degree of Focus Hypothesis where the hypothesized notion of concentration of attention stemming from inversion was found to be applicable. The paper stressed that what triggers inversion or non-inversion is a certain communicative effect such as focus rather than a relation of formal determination where one element determines mechanically the form or appearance of another. A contribution to linguistic and educational research, the paper, therefore, highlighted the importance of a human factor in the functioning of language, and emphasized the need to break away from grammar-based teaching (traditional grammar) to discourse-based language teaching (communicative grammar) where languaging rather than language should be the focus of language teaching and learning.

The study presented in this article deals with the order of the verbal predicate (V) and its nominal core arguments (A- and P-argument) in declarative transitive clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). A central finding of the study was that at the macro level of FinSL transitive clauses are not ordered in one unambiguous way, but at least three structural combinations of the verbal and its core arguments are possible: AVP, APV, and PAV. The type of clause was found to affect sign order in that isolated clauses only occurred with the orders AVP and APV, whereas textual clauses also manifested the order PAV, or even involved omission of the core arguments. At the micro level, however, sign order in FinSL showed regular patterns similar to those found in other sign languages: (i) A-argument was always expressed before V, and there was also a strong tendency to express A-argument before P-argument; (ii) verbal initial structures were not used; and (iii) verbals including a classifier morpheme – i.e. verbals on the basis of which FinSL could be identified as a head-marking language – were placed at the end of the sentence. The article also discusses the extent to which the clause is an appropriate unit to be used in the future description of FinSL.

Системы порядка слов с цепочками клитик могут быть описаны в терминах синтаксических ограничений. Все известные системы порядка слов с клитиками могут быть отнесены к одному из четырех типов, называемых в статье W-системами, W+-системами, W*-системами и V-системами. Кластеризуемые клитики обычно являются элементами уровня предложения: образование цепочки происходит в определенной синтаксической позиции. Выделяются правила барьера, порождающие порядки слов, где вся цепочка или часть клитик цепочки стоят вне канонической позиции кластеризации: такие порядки слов трактуются в работе как производные.

While much of the English School has focused on liberal aspects of solidarism, forms of “illiberal solidarism” in contemporary international society remain underexplored. Drawing on archival material and elite interviews conducted in Central Asia in the period 2013–2019, this paper advances the claim that the Central Asian elites have developed the institution of authoritarianism in their region through the mechanisms of mimicry/emulation and praise/blame. By looking at specific discourses and practices over the last two decades, the paper discusses how the Central Asian governments have been using the new elements of the “democratic transition” in combination with the traditional legitimation offered by diplomatic recognition to secure authoritarian regimes in the democratic age, to create authoritarian state-centric solidarity in the region, and to make “avtoritet” and “stabil'nost'” fundamental pillars of the Central Asian regional order. The paper contributes to the English School literature by providing an initial account of illiberal solidarism and by showing how authoritarianism can potentially be an institution of specific regional international societies; to the authoritarian diffusion literature by demonstrating that authoritarianism can have a deontic component alongside considerations of domestic survival; and to the broader norm diffusion literature by focusing on the spread of illiberal values.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of post-verbal arguments in the OV language Kurdish. The arguments involved are Recipients, Addressees, and Goals, together subsumed under the label "Goal (G)". The resulting word order pattern, OVG, is typologically unusual; it is argued that it can be considered a blending of the VOG pattern characteristic of the Semitic languages spoken in the southeast of the Kurdish speech zone, in particular Neo-Aramaic, and the GOV pattern characteristic of Turkic (cf. Stilo 2005, Haig, to appear). The paper further argues for a corpus-based approach to tracking contact influence, and advocates greater attention to such "minor word order patterns" as finer-grained indicators of language contact.

In Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, much has been done in reconstructing the sound system of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and in reconstructing a large number of cognate lexical items assumed to have been part of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, and there has been considerable work in terms of what morphology can or cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Sino-Tibetan, but it is much harder to say that two syntactic patterns are cognate than to say that two morphological paradigms or particular words are cognate. Within the family we find that modern Sinitic varieties vary from most of the Tibeto-Burman languages in terms of basic clause structure. In this paper we look at information structure in Old Chinese to attempt to find a directionality to the changes found in the long period we think of as Old Chinese, and to look back to the starting point of those changes to see what the clause structure of the precursor of Old Chinese might have been. As it turns out to be more similar to the dominant patterns of Tibeto-Burman languages, it allows us to hypothesize what the patterns were in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

This paper claims that lexical categories (V, N) and functional categories (D, I, C) behave differently in bilingual code-switching: whereas functional heads always determine the order of their code-switched complements, lexical heads may not do so. This proposal thus deviates from many recent studies which suggest that all heads determine the order of their complements (e.g. Mahootian, 1993; MacSwan, 1999; Nishimura, 1997; Nishimura and Yoon, 1998). Assuming a “Null Theory” perspective (Mahootian, 1993; MacSwan, 1999), code-switching data are explained here in terms of existing syntactic apparatus which also governs monolingual syntax. It is proposed that word order between lexical categories and their complements is determined by head parameter instead of feature strength as an intrinsic property of the lexical heads. Nonetheless, head-complement order is inherently specified in functional categories. On this account, prepositions are functional heads instead of lexical heads.

Slavic word order systems are compared with typologically similar systems attested in other areas. Slavic word order systems with clitics are classified on the basis of syntactic constraints without sticking to hypotheses about language-specific properties of prosodically deficient elements and to provide a viable typological classification, which can be verified by data from other world‘s languages. A salient characteristics of South Slavic, West Slavic and Old East Slavic languages are constraints on the placement of the so called clusterizing clitics. Clusterizing clitics make up strings arranged in a rigid order according to a principle called Clitic Template, the permutations are excluded as ungrammatical. In Slavic languages, only clause-level clitics have clusterizing properties. Slavic clusterizing clause-level clitics are represented by the following categories of elements: 1) short forms of argument and reflexive pronouns 2) auxiliaries 3) particles. Strings of clusterizing clitics have a fixed position in Slavic main and subordinate clauses and tend to take clausal-second position (2P). There is an important research line basing on the hypothesis that prosodically deficient elements, proclitics and enclitics, are also syntactically deficient and constitute a natural class definable in UG. Recent studies of the syntax/prosody interface show a gradual increase of the emphasis made on the prosodic component at the expense of syntax. However, some constraints on the placement of clitics directly or indirectly entail constraints on the placement on non-clitic sentence categories. If constraints of the latter type are straightforwardly explained as an outcome of the allegedly purely prosodic ordering of clitics, there is a risk to overlook syntactic mechanisms of linearization. I argue that most Slavic languages lack grammaticalized constraints on the placement of (non-clitic) verbal forms in sentences with the basic word order but such constraints tend to arise in sentences with derived word order, producing non-initial sequences [Verb–Clitic] and [Clitic–Verb] in main clause declaratives.

We investigated the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five-and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children's agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults' lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle takes longer to be acquired.

The study of Word order has a long history. It is Greenberg (1960, 1963) who has initiated serious investigation on the word order typology of languages and listed down his implications. Topologists like Vennman (1974), Keenan (1978), Lehmann (1978). Steele (1975), Comrie (1981), Hawkins (1983), Croft (1990) and others have studied word order typology in the light of language universals. Studying languages from the point of view of word order typology is a practice, which is well known in Linguistics. It has been investigated based on structuralist’s as well as transformational generative grammarian’s points of view.
Fixing the basic word order of a language as SVO, SOV, VSO etc., and its manifestations in the structure of the language is found to be a useful and necessary investigation. Apart from comparing two languages for their grammatical differences, comparing them from the point of view of word order typology is found to be a very useful investigation. Difference in word order structures of the languages is the manifestation of their configurational structures. Greenberg and his followers have proved that contrastive study of word order typology is very useful..
By its very nature such a study is bound to help translators in making decisions on cross-lingual transfer i.e., translating one language into another. In the advent of machine translation, transfer of source language structure into target language structure has become very crucial. Word order typological comparison comes as a boon for machine translation as it gives clues to make rules to transfer the structure of one language into another. It is in this context the present thesis work has been under taken.
The aim of this research work is to correlate the word order of English and Tamil from the point of view of word order typology and to explore the avenues to promote translation with the knowledge gained from the output of the comparison of the word orders of the two languages. The traditional perception of word order is based on the description of syntax as sentence grammar, that is, as an arrangement of words in sentences. Word order or the order of sentential constituents is an outcome of an interplay of several principles such as grammatical, semantic, textual and contextual.
The ordering of S(ubject), O(bject) and V(erb) gives rise to six logically possible types namely SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV; but in every language one can identify the normal or unmarked order of words. It may be said that the order which is statistically the most frequent one matches the native speaker’s intuitive ‘feel’ for normal word order. Also languages may be grouped into two categories: those which have a relatively free order like Tamil/Sanskrit and those which have a relatively strict word order like English/Chinese. It is with this background word order typology of English and Tamil has been studied and presented as a thesis work.
It can be inferred that English as an SVO word order language and Tamil as an SOV word order language show different configurational structures and constitutional arrangements of words, phrases and clauses. This can be represented in terms of transfer rules which can be manipulated for translating English into Tamil and vice versa.
Methodology adopted here is word order typology. Universal typology and language universals have been extensively studied and the word order structures of English and Tamil have been explored in this background. The word order typologies of relative clause, complement clause, and subordination and co-ordination have been thoroughly studied and the marked and unmarked features of English as SVO language and Tamil as an SOV language have been established in this background.

This entry has been prepared for the Historical Encyclopedia of the Russian Language. Энциклопедический словарь. / В.Б. Крысько (ред.) М.: Азбуковник, 2020. ISBN 978-5-91172-192-3.
The References section is deliberately minimized, according to the format of this edition. I give an account of phonetic and syntactic clitics in Old Russian, with focus on the clustering enclitics. Towards the end, I discuss the remnants of the Old Russian systems of enclitics in the later periods of Russian.

NB! The correct pages in the final edition are pp. 478 - 494. The year of the publication is 2020.

In this paper I discuss two types of adjectival modification in Polish, namely the semantics of prenominal and postnominal adjectives. I discuss different entailment patterns related to the placement of adjectival modifiers and the relation between adjectives in both positions and genericity. I postulate a unified intersective semantics for both prenominal and postnominal adjectives and argue that they are predicates denoting properties of objects and kinds respectively. I posit that the kind area is associated with the NP and in the process of semantic composition nouns first combine with postnominal modifiers and then with prenominal ones. The proposal is based on the syntactic analysis of Rutkowski and Progovac (2005) and the semantic framework of McNally and Boleda (2004).