Linguist Forum

Specializations => Morphosyntax => Topic started by: zaba on January 30, 2015, 10:57:48 AM

Title: SVO word-order and modifiers.
Post by: zaba on January 30, 2015, 10:57:48 AM

So English is SVO.

What do you make of the sentence "Many."
"Many" cannot be the subject, object or verb.

In a SVO framework where does it fit in?

Title: Re: SVO word-order and modifiers.
Post by: Daniel on January 30, 2015, 12:15:08 PM

SVO refers to canonical word order in a normal sentence like "John saw Mary." Obviously "Many." is not a normal/canonical sentence. I'm not sure it's a sentence at all. Perhaps it's a sentence in elliptical form in answer to a question. But that wouldn't tell you much about word order.

Title: Re: SVO word-order and modifiers.
Post by: zaba on January 30, 2015, 03:05:00 PM

Even a sentence like "John is fat" is not SVO.
So, then, how would one characterise it?

Title: Re: SVO word-order and modifiers.
Post by: Daniel on January 30, 2015, 04:43:56 PM

Why?

SVO refers to the notion of "basic constituents" across languages. Those constituents are S, V and O.

You could classify this as, for exampe, SVA, but I don't know of anyone who does that because I don't know what theoretical value it would have. Maybe there is some! But you'd have to find a reason.

I would, however, expect that word order in an SVO language in general, where the subject is first and verb is second followed by other things.

http://wals.info/chapter
Look at 81-91 for some commonly discussed word order comparisons. There's no reason you couldn't do more, but you'd have to find something interesting for the comparisons to be meaningful.