Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
Typological versus language-particular description
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
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Typological versus language-particular description of word order The various word order characteristics discussed in this chapter provide a basis for minimally characterizing word order in a language, but there is usually much more to be said about word order in a language beyond simply identifying a language with respect to these characteristics. For one thing, most languages allow both orders for some pairs of elements, and often the full description of the various factors relevant will be quite complex. The following examples from English illustrate just some of the complexity surrounding the position of adjectives and adjective phrases relative to the noun: the interesting man, *the man interesting, the only interesting man, the only man interesting, *the afraid man, *the man afraid, the only man afraid, a man more interesting than the mayor, *a more interesting than the mayor man, a more interesting man than the mayor, etc. Second, there are many more fine-tuned questions that can be asked with respect to certain categories of words that are found widely among languages in the world that do not always fall cleanly into the categories we have dis- cussed. At the level of noun modification, for example, one can ask about the position of interrogative modifiers with meanings such as ‘which’, ‘what sort of’, ‘how many’, and ‘whose’. In most languages, such elements occur in Word order 115 the same place in the noun phrase as corresponding noninterrogative words, but there are exceptions. For example in Ocotepec Mixtec, most modifiers, including demonstratives and adjectives, follow the noun, as in (128a), but the interrogative modifier meaning ‘which’ or ‘what’ precedes the noun, as in (128b). (128) a. ˜n¯uu l¯ul´ı ˜n´ukw´an b. na te¯e town little this what man N Adj Dem Int N ‘this little town’ ‘what man?’ And third, most languages have some words whose position is different from that of other words in the language and which simply require special description. For example, Mam (verb-initial) employs directional particles which precede the verb, like the particle jaw ‘up’ in (129); its behaviour is unlike that of adverbs, for example, which follow the verb in Mam. (129) ma jaw b’iit’j rec.past up explode ‘it exploded’ Ngalakan, a Gunwinyguan language of northern Australia (Merlan (1983)), exhibits considerable freedom of word order, but one particle ŋ ara ‘perhaps’ normally occurs at the end of the sentence, as in (130). (130) ŋ i˜n-ganammup ŋ ara 2sg-deaf perhaps ‘perhaps you are deaf’ And in Lezgian, although modifiers of nouns otherwise precede the noun, the word kwaz ‘even’ follows the noun, when it is modifying a noun, as in (131). (131) ˇci Qabustanba-dikaj sew-er-iz-ni kwaz kiˇc’e-da 1pl.gen Qabustanba-case bear-pl-dat-also even afraid-fut ‘even bears are afraid of our Qabustan-ba!’ Download 1.59 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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