From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 15:41:40 GMT

In article <83987@bcsaic.boeing.com> rwojcik@atc.boeing.com writes:
>
>I think that Sproat's work is probably the seminal work here, and there are
>more than a few problems with it.  For one thing, it seems to predict that
>all VSO languages, if they have auxiliary verbs, will have something like
>AUX-S-V-O word order.  This is the case in Welsh and Irish, anyway.  However,
>their sister Celtic language, Breton, has canonical AUX-V-S-O order.  I 
>don't think that anyone has come up with a method for keeping auxiliaries and
>main verbs together that isn't simply ad hoc.  How do you get the main verb
>(and non-tensed auxiliaries) to the left of the subject without an INFL node
>to receive them?  

First, thank you for at last injecting some empirical substance into
this discussion.  Breton has not attracted a lot of attention, but then
again neither has Welsh.  There may indeed be problems lurking in
Breton, but your example does not by itself show problems for the
hypothesis that VSO languages have a VP.

I don't have Sproat's paper in front of me (and I think it was as
"seminal" as a variety of other papers, but that's not important).  I do
think that it only makes your prediction if you add in certain other
assumptions:

	1) V movement can only be to a position higher than AUX
	2) V cannot move to a position higher than AUX, adjoining first
	   to AUX and then moving with AUX to this higher position

I don't know of any reason to stick to these assumptions, though they
may have been Sproat's for all I know.  Drop 1 or drop 2, and you have a
suggestion for Breton.  If you drop 1, then V movement proceeds to a
position lower than (the highest) AUX (we know that there are such
positions, even in English where there can be three slots for
auxiliaries; other evidence is advanced in a celebrated paper by
Jean-Yves Pollock).  V moves to the position of "___"  (the VP could be
SOV, for all I know):

	AUX [___  [S V O]]

The two proposals predict different things about constituency.  Drop 1,
and VSO should be a constituent (as should SO).  Drop 2, and AUX V
should be a constituent (as should SO). 

>Also, with pure VSO structure, Sproat's analysis still leaves
>an untidy constituent analysis:  V[SO], without any natural evidence to suggest
>that [SO] forms a constituent.  

I don't think there's any substance to this criticism.  Who's more tidy
is not a matter you or I can decide.  However, yes, I'd like to know if
there is independent evidence around that SO form a constituent. For
example, can you coordinate V [SO and SO]?

>Finally, there is the problem of copular sentences.
>All VSO languages have predicate NPs and APs preceding their subjects.  Yet 
>predicate APs and NPs are not in the same lexical (X) class as verbs.  Why do
>they occur in the same grammatical slot?  The problem I have with such analyses
>is not the evidence that they "discover," but the counterevidence that they
>ignore.  

Are you quite sure?  Supposing this is right, perhaps the predicate
moves to a null copular verb, which then raises.  I don't know; this is an
interesting question.  No Celtic specialist I, I can be fairly sure that
Jim McCloskey has said something about this, perhaps in one of his
papers. Whether it's a real problem or not, I can't say.  Anyone know
something about the matter?

>Breton gets talked about by GB linguists, but usually only
>where it contains evidence to strengthen GB analyses.  The fact that it is a
>gross embarrassment for the theory should be a required appendix to all GB
>analyses of the language.  ;-)

Can't we try to acknowledge that serious work does not solve every
problem at once without raising accusations of "ignoring"
problems, "gross embarassment" and insinuations of foul intent?  That's
just not how things are. Please, you figure out how Breton argues
against, say, McCloskey's analysis of Irish VSO, and write a paper.  It
will be a contribution to the debate.

To the best of my knowledge, Celtic languages are not widely studied in
theoretical linguistics at all.  Randall Hendrick of UNC is the only
person I know to have done large-scale syntactic research on Breton.  On
Welsh I only know Harlow's article and a more recent piece by Rouveret.
How much is done on Irish besides McCloskey?  On non-Celtic VSO, how
much is there besides Chung?  Are there really enough data points for
you to launch accusations?  The fact is that those languages tend to get
the most syntactic attention for which there are native (or near-native)
speakers doing syntax.  Hence all the attention to West European
languages but not Slavic, Hungarian but not Finnish or Turkish,
Japanese, Korean and Chinese but not Vietnamese, etc.

But, on the up-side, thank you again for raising issues of substance.  A
welcome change.

-David Pesetsky
Newsgroups: sci.lang