Word order variation in spatial descriptions with adverbs

Word Order Variation in Khoekhoe

This paper examines word order variation in Khoekhoe (short for Khoekhoegowab, also known as Nama/Damara), a Central Khoisan language spoken in Namibia and South Africa. Khoekhoe has been claimed repeatedly to have a clause-second position (Washburn 2001, den Besten 2002, Brugman 2009) and to have topological fields similar to German (Witzlack-Makarevich 2006). However, previous generative anal...

Postpositions and Word Order Variation in Korean

Word Order Acquisition in Persian Speaking Children

Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio...

Word Order Variation and Tree-Adjoining Grammar

In many headnal languages such as German, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean, but also in some other languages such as Russian, arguments of a verb can occur in any order. Furthermore, arguments can occur outside of their clause (\long-distance scrambling"). Long-distance scrambling presents a challenge both to linguistic theory and to formal frameworks for linguistic description because it is very un...

Constructions , complexity , and word order variation

This chapter is concerned with the possibility of accounting for word order and word order variation in terms of complexity. I propose that it is useful to consider word order variation in terms of competing constructions, where other things being equal, the less complex construction is preferred by speakers. This view of variation presupposes that we have a way of measuring complexity. I sugge...