WORD ORDER TYPOLOGY

Word order has been a highly prominent

area of research in typology.

Word order refers to constituentorder.

Word order concerns constituents on both clausal and phrasal levels.

Languages differ in how fixed, or rigid, their word

order is.

English is an example of a

language with a rigid word order.

The child stole my money.

My money stole the child.

Stole the child my money Or Stole my money the child.

Because the syntactic roles of the constituents in English are determined by the word order, the subject comes before the verb and the object comes after it.

The dog chased the cat.

Here the dog is the subject of the sentence and the cat the object.

o When we swap the two NPs,

The cat chased the dog.

The two NPs also swap grammatical relations.

However, not all languages are as rigid in their word order as English.

Nhanda is an example of a language with free, or flexible, word order.

abarla-lu wumba-yi wur’a-thachild-ERG steal-PPERF money-1SGOBL S V Oabarla-lu wur’a-tha wumba-yi S O Vwumba-yi wur’a-tha abarla-lu V O Swumba-yi abarla-lu wur’a-tha V S Owur’a-tha wumba-yi abarla-lu O V Swur’a-tha abarla-lu wumba-yi O S V

As the case marking makes clear what syntactic roles the argument have, the meaning of the

sentence stays the same if the constituents are swapped around.

This is because pronominal arguments may follow different word order rules from nominal

arguments. For example, in Italien, the pronoun may pre-

cliticize to the verb, changing the word order from SVO to SOV.

in order to determine the basic order of a language, simple declarative sentences are sought, where both arguments of the verbs are nominal ( i.e. The dog, the big dog and so on)

a. il ragazzo ha visto la donna [SVO] ART boy AUX see.PTCPL ART woman S V O

«The boy has seen the woman.»

b. il ragazzo l’=ha visto ART boy ART=AUX see.PTCPL S O V«The boy has seen her.»

The man saw the ball (SVO)Who saw the ball? (SVO)What did the man see? (OSV)

Another more marked sentence type is that of questions.

In English, the question word is sentence initial, irrespective of whether it refers to the subject or the

object.

The less marked sentence type, the declarative statement, is considered to exhibit the more basic

word order.

Often, though by no means always, this is also the most frequent word order in the

language.

Frequency is, in fact, the most straightforward factor in determining

basic constituent order.

This demands a large amount of varied texts.

Frequency is still a rather neutral operational test. In

languages where one order is considerably more frequent

than the others, anyone examining a large amount of texts is likely to arrive at the

same conclusion.

In most languages there is likely to be a dominant word order, but, as we will see, there are also languages where two or more word orders occur with roughly the same frequency.