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Is SVO the most natural word order? | ||
Tags: Multilingual | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 21 10 September 2013 at 10:58am | IP Logged | ||
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The problem with all this talk about SVO, OVS etc. is that some linguists have claimed that any language has a basic word order, and that this basic word order has consequences that are so welldefined that you can postulate that they are linguistic universals.
I have found a text where I'm happily unable to read the explanations (in Hebrew) so that the claims really stand out. Let's have a look at some of them: In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object In languages with prepositions, the genitive almost always follows the governing noun, while in languages with postpositions it almost always precedes Languages with dominant VSO order are always prepositional. With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional. If a language has dominant SOV order and the genitive follows the governing noun, then the adjective likewise follows the noun. (and so forth) I can't say whether all these claims (including those I didn't quote) are true or not, but I have seen articles where a language apparently had a dominant word order, but to make some 'universal' truly universal the author tried in every way possible to prove that the obvious wordorder was hiding a true deeper-level basic word order. And then things have been turned upside down. If you have to invent hidden 'true' wordorders to make some claim universal then you have left science and entered the world of dogmatism. Universals are basically statistical, even in cases where you haven't yet found a counter example. Besides it doesn't really make sense to talk about O's and S's in ergative languages. BTW. Klingon is OSV, and this was chosen because it is there rarest one for real human languages. Quenya is said to be SOV. PS: the last rule in the Hebrew paper sounds as follows: When the general rule is that the descriptive adjective follows, there may be a minority of adjectives which usually precede, but when the general rule is that descriptive adjectives precede, there are no exceptions. My answer: "heir apparent" is an exception Edited by Iversen on 10 September 2013 at 11:25am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4713 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 18 of 21 10 September 2013 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's useless even in Spanish for example if you don't actually need to make the subject
explicit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5312 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 19 of 21 14 September 2013 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Languages with dominant VSO order are always prepositional.
This is perhaps the surest of these rules, even though some of these languages have case inflection based on endings, like classical Arabic, and some case inflections based on prefixes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yenome Hexaglot Newbie United States Joined 5380 days ago 37 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Persian Studies: Thai, Arabic (Iraqi), Mandarin | Message 20 of 21 19 September 2013 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
"Heir apparent" began its life as a borrowing from French, though. I don't think it disproves the rule anymore than the phrases "lingua franca" or "femme fatale" do. If you are not using a legal term but just speaking of who appears to be the heir, any English speaker would say "the apparent heir." 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 21 20 September 2013 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is still an exception, but as is the case with most exceptions there is a good reason for this one to be one.
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