Thursday, April 16, 2015

If it were simple, we wouldn't be arguing about it...

One of the parameters by which languages can be classified is basic word order. “Basic” is often understood to mean the pragmatically unmarked or neutral word order. Of the several orders allowed by a particular language, usually one order occurs in a wide variety of discourse contexts, whereas the others have more restricted uses. The word order with a broader contextual distribution is the unmarked or basic order…

Basic word order is sometimes used to mean the statistically dominant order, the one that is most frequent in spoken or written texts. There is a widespread assumption that the pragmatically neutral word order is also the most frequent. According to Greenberg (1966b: 67), textual frequency is the only criterion by which basic word order can be established. “Statistically dominant” is clearly a less meaningful definition of basic word order than “pragmatically neutral,” because frequency is a feature of language use rather than language structure. In practice, however, researchers usually rely on textual frequency in establishing basic word order, because proving that a particular order is pragmatically neutral is an extremely involved procedure, requiring the identification and classification of all discourse contexts in which each word order occurs.— Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause, pages 7–8

No comments: