Timeline for What grammatical features do SOV languages often share?
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16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 16, 2018 at 10:03 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | 1. Circular 2. Untrue anyway, as some verbs take dative, like помочь, just like in German. 3. Orthogonal to affirmation and negation. | |
| Feb 15, 2018 at 16:06 | comment | added | Atamiri | @A.M.Bittlingmayer Example of what? In an affirmative sentence the subject has nominative case and the direct object has accusative case so whenever a substantive serves as a direct object the used form is the accusative. If the verb is negated it might have genitive case but this rule depends on the language. In English you wouldn’t say “sheep” is a singular form, it’s both singular and plural. Maybe you just seem to confuse morphology and syntax, | |
| Feb 15, 2018 at 14:59 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | @Atamiri What's an example? Note I said they "require genitive forms", nobody is claiming that it is actually genitive syntactically, although there again I am suspicious of absolute claims for either. | |
| Feb 15, 2018 at 11:53 | comment | added | Atamiri | @A.M.Bittlingmayer Well, the clear argument is that direct objects in affirmative sentence are indicated with the accusative so you can’t take the masc anim forms to be in the genitive without arbitrarily making the syntax more complex. As for Bulgarian and Macedonian they use head-marking on verbs but Macedonian differs form Bulgarian in how consequently it uses head-marking. Bulgarian is more like Spanish in this respect. | |
| Feb 15, 2018 at 10:19 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | That reminds me, there is another strategy for allowing free worder without case, found in both Spanish and Bulgaro-Macedonian: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronominal_reduplication. | |
| Feb 15, 2018 at 10:18 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | @Atamiri I know, but it seems very arbitrary, after years I have not made up my mind about which point of view is correct. (Would like to hear some arguments for either.) Anyway it makes no difference for the question at hand, the point is that Spanish uses prepositions where Slavic without Bulgaro-Macedonian uses morphological case. | |
| Feb 14, 2018 at 1:19 | comment | added | Atamiri | @A.M.Bittlingmayer This is not quite correct, in Slavic languages the masculine animate accusative forms equal to the genitive forms. Your comment is only correct from a diachronic point of view, in corpora the appropriate tag is ACC. | |
| Feb 13, 2018 at 7:57 | comment | added | Adam Bittlingmayer | To add to @sumelic's point, prepositions are yet another strategy for preserving free word order. Most Iberian Romance languages generally require a before an animate direct object. This is very analogous to Slavic requiring genitive forms for masculine accusative animate, which would otherwise be indistinguishable from nominative. | |
| Feb 12, 2018 at 18:13 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackLinguist/status/963113728924356608 | ||
| Feb 11, 2018 at 12:18 | answer | added | Atamiri | timeline score: 2 | |
| Feb 11, 2018 at 6:39 | comment | added | brass tacks | (Verb agreement also seems to be an important way subjects and objects are disambiguated in languages that don't have case markers: Universal 296 is "IF nouns do not inflect for case and verbs carry no relational marking either, THEN basic order is SVO or OSV" and it seems to be harder to find counterexamples to that one) | |
| Feb 11, 2018 at 6:28 | comment | added | brass tacks | The relevant universal seems to be #8 in "The Universals Archive", but it's stated a bit differently ("IF basic order for nominal arguments is verb-final (i.e. SOV or OSV), THEN there is almost always a case system") and the notes mention a number of counterexamples and express some doubt as to its validity. | |
| Feb 11, 2018 at 6:06 | comment | added | brass tacks | I don't think it's true that "if a language doesn't indicate case, it'll be forced into a verb-medial order (SVO or OVS) to differentiate subject from object." If a language has strict SOV or VSO word order, for example, the identity of the subject will be unambiguous even without differential marking of the subject and the object. And even if the word order is not so strict, languages can get along with some ambiguity. Consider that many languages that have grammatical case have nominative-accusative syncretism in at least some contexts (it's universal in Indo-European for neuter gender) | |
| Feb 11, 2018 at 5:58 | comment | added | user6726 | Which question are you really asking: "What grammatical features do SOV languages often share", or "are all SOV languages like this?". | |
| Feb 11, 2018 at 4:43 | history | edited | curiousdannii♦ |
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| Feb 11, 2018 at 2:33 | history | asked | user19661 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |