Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Section E: Word Order 63
Universality and the word order variation issue today
Mereu, Lunella
University of Roma Tre
mereu@uniroma3.it
The aim of this paper is to discuss whether word order phenomena can lead us to single out
universal principles of sentence construction in the languages of the world. The question has
long been debated but, though we know a lot now about many typologically different
languages, still there is no agreement in the linguistic community.
It is well known that there are two main opposing views in relation to syntactic variation: I)
the typological and 2) the formal view. Typologists distinguish between fixed word order and
free word order languages and motivate the two types in terms of pragmatic constraints
(Givón 1984). Formal linguists, instead, belong to two groups: one group denies word order
variation and universally represents languages as SVO configurational structures (Kayne
1994); a second group makes a distinction between two macro-types, configurational and
non-configurational, (Hale 1983), or, more recently, between syntactically oriented and
morphologically oriented languages (Baker 1996).
In the paper we will reconsider the configurationality issue by trying to detect the principles
that govern and constraint word order variation.
We will start by comparing different kinds of syntactic representations that have been
proposed in formal syntax to account for sentence structure in non-configurational languages,
mainly according to Baker’s morphological hypothesis, and to Bresnan’s (2001) treatment of
non-configurational languages.
Next, we will show that the morphological richness of languages, although relevant, does not
universally affect word order variation, since there are languages with no inflectional
morphology showing word order flexibility, for example Chinese.
We will then analyse Chinese word order behaviour and, following Li and Thompson’s
(1976, 1981) proposal, we will show how pragmatic principles or, more precisely, specific
information structure strategies determine the way sentences are built in this kind of
languages.
Finally we will compare Chinese word order behaviour with that typical of configurational
languages such as Italian in syntactically and pragmatically marked contexts, that is in
sentences with left and right dislocations or focalization, with or without contrastive meanings
associated. We will also analyse the intonation patterns of sentences drawn from a corpus of
spoken Italian and will discuss their prosodic structures.
Comparing languages of the Chinese type (non configurational) with languages of the Italian
type (configurational) and also with languages of the Warlpiri type (morphologically
oriented), it will emerge how all languages adopt the following two pragmatic strategies in
organizing sentence structure:
1. as sequences of Given – New information;
2. as sequences of [+ Prominent] – [– Prominent] information
Languages vary according to whether they apply both strategies or just one: Chinese and other
non configurational languages including those morphologically oriented adopt only the
second strategy, while Italian and other configurational languages can apply both strategies.