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What are the general word order trends of VO languages

For a start, see https://wals.info/chapter/83 "Order of object and verb", section 3 on "Theoretical issues". (Your question would seem to require a survey article or a book as an ...
Alazon's user avatar
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2 votes
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Why do dominant VSO languages all have SVO as an alternative word order?

If you take a Chomskyan view of syntax, it's not possible to get a VSO order without some sort of movement. The arguments to a verb are always Merged in first, and then the subject attaches somewhere ...
Draconis's user avatar
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1 vote
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Chomsky on licensing parasitic gaps in English

Parasitic Gaps The book(i) that you filed __(i) without reading __(i) The book that [you filed the book [without reading the book]] In the example noun phrase, modelled in (1) and (2) above, we see ...
Araucaria - him's user avatar
3 votes

Is the head function also called nucleus, or is nucleus a subtype of head?

This is a purely terminological confusion. The diagram is supposed to convey that in some specific cases, a head is called a nucleus. But in the "Head" article, the word "nucleus" ...
Christopher Ford's user avatar
3 votes

How many beats is a syllable?

A syllable is an organizational abstraction, a grouping of consonants around a vowel (with various putative exceptions). Beyond that, it doesn't make any sense to try to "define" a syllable, ...
user6726's user avatar
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3 votes

On colorless green ideas

First, it should be clear that in natural languages nothing has a rigid definition. To make sense of a sentence is thus to select "definitions" so that the sentence has the intended meaning. ...
Dodezv's user avatar
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0 votes

Why is binarity emphasized so much in linguistics?

{a} + {b} -> {a, b} + {c} -> {a, b, c} seems much more complicated to me than {a} + {b} + {c} -> {a, b, c} Complexity and difficulty are different problems. A recursive algorithm may have a ...
vectory's user avatar
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3 votes

On colorless green ideas

Chomsky observed (Syntactic structures p. 15) that "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" are both "equally nonsensical", but ...
user6726's user avatar
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1 vote

Why is binarity emphasized so much in linguistics?

Binarity is favored over alternatives by general scientific logic, therefor to the extent that a linguist is concerned with scientific logic, that is the expcted tendency. However the specific details ...
user6726's user avatar
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