1 ENG 590: History of the English Language — Spring 2005: MON & THU 10.30-12.00 Linguistics Section, Department of English Studies — University of Cyprus Kleanthes K. Grohmann (Room M 004, Phone x2106, kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy) March 28, 2005 CLASS 16 : APPROACHES TO WORD ORDER CHANGES TYPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO WORD ORDER The “Drifting Hypothesis” (Lehmann 1973) : “When languages show patterns other than those expected, we may assume they are undergoing change.” [p. 55] This implies that throughout its history, English has been drifting from OV VO (presumably, ME represents the period in which this very determinant of word order was in transition from one type to the other). Natural Serialization (Vennemann 1974) : a. Natural Serialization Principle (NSP): operators and operands must be serialized in a consistent order — either Operator Operand, or Operand Operator — in any language. Since objects (along with main verbs, adjectives, relative clauses, etc.) are Operators and verbs Operands, the NSP predicts the correlations with OV and VO orders, and of course also predicts diachronic correlations. b. “a language may become fairly consistent within a type in about 5000 years (e.g. English)” [p. 353] c. XV > VX: “as reductive phonological change weakens the S-O morphology, and does not develop some substitute S-O morphology, the language becomes a VX language” [p. 359] d. SXV > TVX (approx. V2) > SVX (Romance, English) e. “we can predict that German, a TVX language […] will become an SVX language” [p. 361] Greenberg’s Universal 41 : “If in a language the verb follows both the nominal subject and nominal object in dominant order, the language almost always has a case system.” [Greenberg (1966: 96)] • loss of case neither necessary (Greek, Icelandic) nor sufficient (Dutch/Baltic, Slavonic [Comrie (1989: 214-5]) for OV > VO • TVX independent of OV/VO (WGmc vs. NGmc, OF, ME)