When the relative position of words within a sentence may change the meaning or grammaticality, a language is said to be sensitive to word order.
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40 views
Origin of actual order pattern in English/German
It is well-known, or better said, well-accepted, that the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was a OV language with a very limited (or nonexistent) use of subordinate clauses. In ...
5
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1answer
150 views
What is this feature of British English called?
In British English you'll often hear them post-fixing expressions that American English tends to keep up front.
For example, I've heard British English speakers (golf commentators in particular) say ...
5
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1answer
124 views
The stylistic effect of chiasmus in Latin
The motto of my alma mater is sidere mens eadem mutato, which I gloss:
sidere mens eadem mutato
star-SG.N.ABL mind-SG.F.NOM same-SG.F.NOM change-SG.N.ABL
I have long ...
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0answers
50 views
Place of an adverb in the passive present perfect progressive [closed]
I was wondering where an adverb should (or could) be placed in the passive present perfect progressive in English.
I have been being carefully tickled.
OR
I have been carefully being ...
5
votes
1answer
129 views
History of the verb positioning in German
In German, the word order is SVO (or V2, to be precise) in main clauses, while in subordinate clauses have the finite verb in final position; there is some discussion of the word order in "German is ...
4
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131 views
Word order typology in Germanic
I am not a native speaker of English, but I study English and Dutch. I have noticed that the two languages differ in their degree of flexibility. The following sentence, for example, is not acceptable ...
7
votes
1answer
165 views
How do SOV languages develop agreement affixes on verb?
According to WALS, most languages using SOV as basic order of subject, object and verb have some kind of personal agreement markers. As far as I know, these affixes rise by grammaticalization of ...
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vote
1answer
115 views
How do isolating VSO languages differentiate the subject and object?
In some Austronesian languages, which typically lack inflection, subjects appear structurally identical to their objects. What constructs do Verb-Subject-Object languages use to distinguish the two?
2
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1answer
116 views
Why do we need machine translation evaluation?
Why is it that we need machine translation evaluation? If we have subjective evaluation measures why do we need automatic evaluation? As most of the automatic evaluation metrics are unable to capture ...
2
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0answers
62 views
Formal approaches to Russian word order
What are the known formal approaches to Russian (or similar languages) word order? I'd expect something expressed in terms of exteded DRT or similar formalism.
2
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3answers
225 views
What are examples of non-V2 pattern in Modern English?
What is an example of a modern English clause that does not follow the verb-second (V2) word order?
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4answers
472 views
Did case systems dissappear to make embedding easier?
I edited this question in response to Karlsson's paper, "Constraints on Multiple Center-Embedding of Clauses" (Journal of Linguistics 43 (2), 2007, 365-392), linked here: ...
6
votes
2answers
156 views
Focus-marking in different varieties of Spanish
Spanish is often described as putting focused constituents at the end of the sentence, leading for instance to VOS word order in sentences with a focused subject. (For instance, Maria Zubizarreta's ...
5
votes
2answers
139 views
In which varieties of English is it common to front predicates as in “Bought a nice house, he did.”?
In which varieties of English is it common to front predicates as in the following sentence?
Bought a nice house, he did.
In which pragmatic contexts is this done in these varieties?
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8answers
560 views
What is word order used for in “free word order” languages?
Consider languages whose case-systems allow the order of arguments to be changed without changing the arguments’ grammatical relations. (Note the 189 languages noted as having “no dominant ...
5
votes
0answers
139 views
Is there any difference in meaning or nuance when the adjective follows the noun in Georgian?
Many languages allow the order of adjectives compared to nouns to vary, but for different reasons:
Some languages have very free word order in which case there is little difference between adj + ...
2
votes
3answers
550 views
German is SOV: should it not have been “Ich ein Berliner bin”?
German is typically described as a Subject-Object-Verb language. For former American President Kennedy's mistake to be grammatical (i.e. without the indefinite article "ein"), why should it not have ...
4
votes
1answer
292 views
How common is word order change?
During the course of their development, the word order of some languages change. Examples include Latin (SOV) that changed to SVO in the Romance languages, Proto-Austronesian (verb initial) that ...
9
votes
3answers
594 views
Languages with stricter and less strict word order?
I'm sure most people here know, but for completeness, let's define what syntax is:
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. [NOAD]
N.B. It can ...
10
votes
3answers
125 views
How do purely statistical machine translators deal with different word orders?
Even relatively closely related languages can differ greatly in word order. Take English and German for instance.
English is pretty boringly subject-verb-object whereas in German the finite verb must ...
7
votes
1answer
282 views
Relationship between SOV word order and osV prefixes
I've been reading about the Native American language isolate Washo, and looking at the Universals Archive. If an ergative language is SOV, the object and subject affixes will be prefixes and the main ...
