From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 29 Sep 92 16:06:40 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology

In article 13781@athena.mit.edu, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>In article <1992Sep27.153555.43396@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>>Things which a Sapir or a Bloomfield would have seen as rather
>>run-of-the mill seem to have been belatedly discovered by the Chomskyans,
>>such as the existence of VSO languages, 

I don't quite agree that they discovered VSO languages late.  Greenberg's work
on typology represented a different view of "language universals" for many
years, and it just didn't fit into generative theory very easily.  Generative
linguists were looking for a "universal base," of which McCawley's VSO hypothesis
was an outgrowth.  Greenberg's typological work suggested that natural languages
fell into different classes, whereas generativists wanted to emphasize that they
were basically all the same.  Note that Greenberg's categories could not be 
surface level classifications in the transformational era, since they only
represented "trends" in the word order of a given language.  They had to represent
either a deep or intermediate level of representation.  And how do we have
language "types" in monostratal theories?  The current preoccupation with the 
concept of "parameters" is something of a return to the older desire to promote
a "universal base."  You can accomodate typology in terms of the limited number
of ways that you can presumably throw switches.

>Their existence was never in doubt, I'm quite sure.  But it wasn't until
>the fairly recent work of people like Steven Harlow, Richard Sproat, Jim
>McCloskey and Sandra Chung ("Chomskyans" all) that VSO languages had any
>special interest for the syntactician beyond the fact that they were
>VSO.  What these researchers discovered was evidence that VSO languages
>are essentially SVO in structure, with the subject asymmetrically
>commanding the object, and verb movement or its equivalent accounting
>for the surface order.  To the best of my knowledge, this had never been
>shown before, and couldn't be shown before certain other discoveries
>were in hand (e.g. the command conditions on anaphora).

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?  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.  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.  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.  ;-)

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Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA