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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Word order evolution
In-Reply-To: Mauro Bregolin's message of 27 Aug 1996 16:35:45 GMT
Message-ID: <ALDERSON.96Aug28110838@netcom16.netcom.com>
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References: <4vv851$evi@server-b.cs.interbusiness.it>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 18:08:37 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <4vv851$evi@server-b.cs.interbusiness.it> Mauro Bregolin <mbr>
writes:

>However, all eight possible permutations of S-V-O are found in some languages
>(though, I think, some of them are not widespread).

I get six:  SVO, VSO, VOS, SOV, OVS, OSV.  Permutations are not powers of two.

>Is there any theory that explains the reasons of such wild developments over
>time? (i.e., a language may have "offsprings" that will evolve adopting
>different word order structures).

There's nothing particularly wild about most such developments.  There are, to
be sure, several competing theories.  Check any book on syntactic typology.

>Does it make sense to think that in "very old languages" (just a guess, Proto-
>IndoEuropean or of that age) it didn't make a difference to utter sentences
>with a predefined order, and that subsequent evolution led (perhaps randomly?)
>to languages using different word orders?

No, it does not make sense if you want to speak of something as modern as PIE.
Remember that that language is posited to have been spoken only about 6,000
years ago, while humans have probably had the ability to speak for more than
30,000 years (likely modern-style languages such as PIE), and possibly as far
back as 200,000 years.

Since word order choice is not random, but appears to be constrained by percep-
tual strategies, it is likely that random word strings were never a feature of
language.  Your suggestion does not then make sense even for primitive language
(defined as pre-modern-style, and therefore not found anywhere in the world any
longer).
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
