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‘Basic Word Order’ in Formal and Functional Linguistics and the Typological Status of ‘Canonical’ Sentence Types

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Abstract

It is standard practice in typological studies to classify languages in terms of the basic order of the positioning of their subject, the verb and the object. For a wide variety of reasons, a wide variety of scholars have deemed such a classification problematic: the various criteria that have been appealed to in order to motivate one or another basic order often lead to contradictory results, some languages seem to manifest no basic order by any reasonable criteria, and the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ relations themselves are problematic, both in that no consistent criteria exist to identify them cross-linguistically and in that some languages might lack such relations altogether.2

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Authors
  1. Frederick J. Newmeyer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Belgium

    Dominique Willems (Professor of French Linguistics) (Professor of French Linguistics)

  2. University of Ghent’s, UK

    Bart Defrancq (Senior researcher Attached), Timothy Colleman (Researcher Attached) & Dirk Noël (Senior researcher Attached) (Senior researcher Attached),  (Researcher Attached) &  (Senior researcher Attached)

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© 2003 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Newmeyer, F.J. (2003). ‘Basic Word Order’ in Formal and Functional Linguistics and the Typological Status of ‘Canonical’ Sentence Types . In: Willems, D., Defrancq, B., Colleman, T., Noël, D. (eds) Contrastive Analysis in Language. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524637_4

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