The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological ...variants do.
This book presents a new analysis of the word-order alternation of English transitive phrasal verbs (aka Particle Movement) from a cognitive-functional and psycholinguistic perspective. Its main ...objective, however, is a methodological one, namely to demonstrate the superiority of corpus-based, multifactorial and probabilistic approaches towards grammatical phenomena over traditional analyses based on acceptability judgements and minimal pair tests.
We present a visual world eye‐tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive ...sentences in Tseltal is Verb–Object–Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information available at the outset, which should facilitate anticipation of the post‐verbal arguments. Tseltal speakers listened to verb‐initial sentences with either an object‐predictive verb (e.g., “eat”) or a general verb (e.g., “look for”) (e.g., “Ya slo’/sle ta stukel on te kereme,” Is eating/is looking (for) by himself the avocado the boy/ “The boy is eating/is looking (for) an avocado by himself”) while seeing a visual display showing one potential referent (e.g., avocado) and three distractors (e.g., bag, toy car, coffee grinder). We manipulated verb type (predictive vs. general) and recorded participants' eye movements while they listened and inspected the visual scene. Participants’ fixations to the target referent were analyzed using multilevel logistic regression models. Shortly after hearing the predictive verb, participants fixated the target object before it was mentioned. In contrast, when the verb was general, fixations to the target only started to increase once the object was heard. Our results suggest that Tseltal hearers pre‐activate semantic features of the grammatical object prior to its linguistic expression. This provides evidence from a verb‐initial language for online incremental semantic interpretation and anticipatory processing during language comprehension. These processes are comparable to the ones identified in subject‐initial languages, which is consistent with the notion that different languages follow similar universal processing principles.
The first attempt at a restrictive theory of the linear order of sentences and phrases of the world's languages, by one of the founders of cartographic syntax.Linearization, or the typical sequence ...of words in a sentence, varies tremendously from language to language. Why, for example, does the English phrase “a white table” need a different word order from the French phrase “une table blanche,” even though both refer to the same object? Guglielmo Cinque challenges the current understanding of word order variation, which assumes that word order can be dealt with simply by putting a head either before or after its complements and modifiers. The subtle variations in word order, he says, can provide a window into understanding the deeper structure of language and are in need of a sophisticated explanation.The bewildering variation in word order among the languages of the world, says Cinque, should not dissuade us from researching what, if anything, determines which orders are possible (and attested/attestable) and which orders are impossible (and not attested/nonattestable), both when they maximally conform to the “head-final” or “head-initial” types and when they depart from them to varying degrees. His aim is to develop a restrictive theory of word order variation—not just a way to derive the ideal head-initial and head-final word orders but also the mixed cases.In the absence of an explicit theory of linearization, Cinque provides a general approach to derive linear order from a hierarchical arrangement of constituents, specifically, by assuming a restrictive movement analysis that creates structures that can then be linearized by Richard S. Kayne's Linear Correspondence Axiom.
This book presents a new perspective on the interaction between word-order and grammaticalisation by investigating the changes that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have undergone in Romance ...(Catalan, French, Spanish) as compared to Germanic (English, Icelandic). It discusses a great deal of historical comparative data showing that stylistic fronting and oblique subjects have (had) a semantic effect in the Germanic and in the Romance languages, and that they both appear in the same functional category. The loss of stylistic fronting and oblique subjects is seen as an effect of grammaticalisation, where grammaticalisation is taken to be a regular case of parameter change. In contrast to previous and recent approaches to grammaticalisation, however, the author shows that it is not the loss of morphology that triggers grammaticalisation with subsequent word-order changes, but that the word-order change sets off grammaticalisation in the functional categories, which is then followed by the loss of morphology.
This book is the first comprehensive corpus study of element order in Old English and Old High German, which brings to light numerous differences between these two closely related languages. The ...study's innovative approach relies on translated texts, which allows the authors to tackle the problem of the apparent incomparability of OE and OHG textual records and to identify the areas of OE and OHG syntax potentially influenced by the Latin source texts. This is especially important from the point of view of OE research, where Latin is rarely considered to be a significant variable. The book's profile and content is of direct interest to historical linguists working on OE and/or OHG (and Old Germanic languages in general), but it can also greatly benefit several other groups of researchers: scholars applying corpus methods to the study of dead languages, historical linguists generally, linguists researching element order as well as specialists in translation studies.
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