WORD ORDER TYPOLOGY Word order has been a

WORD ORDER TYPOLOGY

Word order has been a highly prominent area of research in typology. v Word order refers to constituent order. v v Word order concerns constituents on both clausal and phrasal levels.

Languages differ in how fixed, or rigid, their word order is. English is an example of a language with a rigid word order.

q The child stole my money. My money stole the child. Stole the child my money Or Stole my money the child. Because the syntactic roles of the constituents in English are determined by the word order, the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after it.

q The dog chased the cat. Here the dog is the subject of the sentence and the cat the object. o When we swap the two NPs, q The cat chased the dog. The two NPs also swap grammatical relations.

However, not all languages are as rigid in their word order as English. Nhanda is an example of a language with free, or flexible, word order.

As the case marking makes clear what syntactic roles the argument have, the meaning of the sentence stays the same if the constituents are swapped around. abarla-lu wumba-yi wur’a-tha child-ERG S abarla-lu S wumba-yi V wur’a-tha O steal-PPERF V wur’a-tha O abarla-lu S wumba-yi V abarla-lu S money-1 SGOBL O wumba-yi V abarla-lu S wur’a-tha O abarla-lu S wumba-yi V

in order to determine the basic order of a language, simple declarative sentences are sought, where both arguments of the verbs are nominal ( i. e. The dog, the big dog and so on) This is because pronominal arguments may follow different word order rules from nominal arguments. For example, in Italien, the pronoun may precliticize to the verb, changing the word order from SVO to SOV.

� a. il ragazzo ha S V ART boy visto AUX see. PTCPL la donna ART woman O «The boy has seen the woman. » � b. il ragazzo l’=ha ART boy S ART=AUX O V «The boy has seen her. » visto see. PTCPL [SVO]

Another more marked sentence type is that of questions. In English, the question word is sentence initial, irrespective of whether it refers to the subject or the object. The man saw the ball (SVO) Who saw the ball? (SVO) What did the man see? (OSV)

The less marked sentence type, the declarative statement, is considered to exhibit the more basic word order. Often, though by no means always, this is also the most frequent word order in the language. Frequency is, in fact, the most straightforward factor in determining basic constituent order. This demands a large amount of varied texts.

Frequency is still a rather neutral operational test. In languages where one order is considerably more frequent than the others, anyone examining a large amount of texts is likely to arrive at the same conclusion. In most languages there is likely to be a dominant word order, but, as we will see, there also languages where two or more word orders occur with roughly the same frequency.