Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
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Matthew S. Dryer
Siroi, a Madang language spoken in Papua New Guinea is also SOV (Wells (1979)), as illustrated in (9). (9) fe-nge tango make-te taipan-spec man bit-3sg.pres S O V ‘a taipan bites a man’ The examples in (10) illustrate how it exhibits the same characteristics as Lezgian and Slave: (10) a. nu pitik kin-it b. mbanduwa ŋ mbi he quickly go-3sg.pres bow instr Adv V np Po ‘he is going quickly’ ‘with a bow’ c. tisa tuku age d. [ne kuayar-at] tukunu teacher of dog you steal-2sg.past because G N Clause Subord ‘the teacher’s dog’ ‘because you stole it’ (We do not have information on how comparative meanings are expressed in Siroi.) 1.2 Verb-initial languages Let us turn now to three instances of verb-initial languages, languages in which the verb normally precedes both the subject and the object. Such languages are much less common than verb-final languages. What we will see is that these languages exhibit the opposite characteristics from those that we saw in the three verb-final languages discussed above. The first verb-initial language we will look at is Fijian, an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean (Dixon (1988)). Both the subject and the object follow the verb in Fijian, though they can occur in either order with respect to each other. Thus, the sentence in (11) can be interpreted either as ‘the old person saw the child’ (VOS) or as ‘the child saw the old person’ (VSO), and both orders are common in usage. (11) e rai-ca a gone a qase 3sg see-trans art child art old.person V S/O S/O ‘the old person saw the child’ or ‘the child saw the old person’ Note that a third person singular clitic agreeing in person and number with the subject precedes the verb. Word order 65 The following examples illustrate how Fijian has the reverse characteristics from those we have observed for verb-final languages. Manner adverbs follow the verb, rather than preceding: (12) bau ’ada va’a-totolo noo somewhat run adv -quick asp V Adv ‘try and run more quickly’ The language employs prepositions (Pr) rather than postpositions: (13) mai Wairi’i from Wairi’i Pr np ‘from Wairi’i’ The genitive follows the possessed noun, rather than preceding. (14) a liga-i Jone art hand-poss John N G ‘John’s hand’ Note that the possessed noun liga ‘hand’ in (14) bears a suffix -i indicating that it is possessed by someone. The order in comparative constructions is adjective-marker-standard, the opposite from what we saw in the verb-final languages: (15) e vina’a ca’e o Waitabu mai Suva 3sg good more art Waitabu from Suva Adj M St ‘Waitabu is better than Suva’ Note that the subject intervenes between the adjective and the marker + standard in (15). And adverbial subordinators occur at the beginning of the subordinate clause, as in (16), where the first singular subject pronoun u of the subordinate clause cliticizes onto the subordinator ni. (16) ni =[u sa daga.daga va’a-levu] when =1sg asp tired adv -great Subord Clause ‘when I’m very tired’ The two other verb-initial languages we will examine resemble Fijian in exhibiting the opposite characteristics from those we saw in the three verb-final |
