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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Iyionaku »

Isfendil wrote:
Iyionaku wrote:How realistic is it for a language to coin "should" and "may" identically? How strongly do those two differ? Are there any examples of natlangs?
What do you mean by should and may? Many languages differentiate between subjunctive, jussive, and volitive, for instance (could, should, and may are used for these in english respectively) but may has a variety of other meanings.
I mean, expressing obligation and permission with the same affix (for a conlang of mine), leaving the exact meaning to the context.
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Post by Frislander »

Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Are there languages that have pronouns that are exclusively affixes rather than as independent words?

Let's say ni= first person koto= to see and se = him and you get the word "Nikotose," "I see him." Would that necessarily make the language SVO? Let's also say that the language is VSO, but "Nikotose" is a oily personal conjugation.
I am certain that there are polysynthetic languages which do exactly this.
There are: Wichita appears to be one, and Wari' another. In many other languahes what appear to be pronouns may in fact be transparently formed from forms like person marker + copula.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

Is it possible for vowel raising to only occur word-finally?
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Post by Clio »

Ahzoh wrote:Is it possible for vowel raising to only occur word-finally?
English actually shows an example of this, if I'm not mistaken. RP has /ɪ/ for final <y> in words like 'country,' but most other dialects have /i/, including dialects that don't raise /ɪ/ elsewhere. I don't think this entails lowering on the part of RP, since I'm pretty sure other words like 'Charlie' and 'tree' have /i/ on both sides of the pond.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

Clio wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:Is it possible for vowel raising to only occur word-finally?
English actually shows an example of this, if I'm not mistaken. RP has /ɪ/ for final <y> in words like 'country,' but most other dialects have /i/, including dialects that don't raise /ɪ/ elsewhere. I don't think this entails lowering on the part of RP, since I'm pretty sure other words like 'Charlie' and 'tree' have /i/ on both sides of the pond.
That's good, then I can justify all of my words only ending in /a i u/.
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Post by qwed117 »

Clio wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:Is it possible for vowel raising to only occur word-finally?
English actually shows an example of this, if I'm not mistaken. RP has /ɪ/ for final <y> in words like 'country,' but most other dialects have /i/, including dialects that don't raise /ɪ/ elsewhere. I don't think this entails lowering on the part of RP, since I'm pretty sure other words like 'Charlie' and 'tree' have /i/ on both sides of the pond.
Also happens in Campidanese Sardinian, where the final endings of the -e nouns became -i. That's only change of that type in Campidanese. I believe the same process happens in back vowels in latin, producing the um endings from PIE's -om (which gave Greeks -on) and us endings from PIE's -os (which gave Greeks -os). These were limited to short vowels, but I don't think that should matter in the context of your question.
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Post by DesEsseintes »

Nachtuil wrote:I am using the affricate k͡x because I find it kind of quirky and charming I suppose. To my dismay I can't find a language where it is an actual phoneme, only ones where it is allophonic with k or x or perhaps even ç or something similar. Is there a language out there that uses it? I have scoured the list on Wikipedia linked to the affricate.
I may use it or make it an allophone too. I probably shouldn't fret about it too much as it is just a conlang but I am also just curious if it is known to be out there and why it might be so rare.

Edit: I spoke too soon. I found it in the Taa language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language
Another example, if you're still interested, is Khoekhoe. Interestingly, k͡x is in free variation with k͡ʟ̝̊ in many click languages.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

Iyionaku wrote:How realistic is it for a language to coin "should" and "may" identically? How strongly do those two differ? Are there any examples of natlangs?
You should read up in modality, because 'should' and 'may' have several meanings. There are definitely languages that have a morpheme that can express obligation and permission, i.e. they are vague or ambigious.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Isfendil »

LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.

On the other hand, persian lacks case but remains SOV, so I could be wrong. Or it could be an exception.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
SOV to SVO is common. SOV is associated with cases determining syntactic function of nouns; SVO is associated with word order determining syntactic function of nouns.

SVO to SOV is very rare from what I've read. I've mainly seen examples of languages losing cases and becoming SVO.
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Post by Frislander »

Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.
They're not entirely correlated. Balto-Slavic languages are pretty case-heavy, but they all have SVO as their main word order. Further, Finnic languages, including some of the most case-heavy languages in the world, are SVO. Na-Dené is a highly polysynthetic family where nouns are not marked for case and frequently don't mark for number either, but they are pretty rigidly verb-final.

To answer your question, then, there's little to say beyond what you can justify though historical changes. For example, independent pronouns in an SVO language grammaticalise into poly-personal marking, freeing up the word order. Alternatively an auxilliary system develops which is located in a different part of the sentence to the main verb (see Germanic languages). The apparent frequency of the SOV to SVO shift seems to be a product mostly of historical linguistic's focus on Indo-European, where the shift seems to have been a general trend within the family.

I've actually seen a paper or two which argues that Vulgar Latin was already SVO, and that is why all Romance languages are SVO.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Clio »

LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
This paper reviews word order change with reference to multiple language families, although you should take it with a grain of salt since it's an attempt at hypothesizing a word order for Proto-World and makes use of the Nostratic hypothesis.

A good example of word order change from SVO to SOV can be found (perhaps; the shift is incomplete) in Mandarin Chinese. Trask mentions this in Historical Linguistics and attributes the change to a certain serial verb construction; I suppose this would be an example of a syntactically, not morphologically, motivated word order change. A more in-depth treatment can be found in Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson, "An Explanation of Word Order Change SVO→SOV," Foundations of Language Vol. 12, No. 2 (Nov., 1974), pp. 201-214, which you may be able to find on JSTOR or some Springer database.
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Post by Omzinesý »

DesEsseintes wrote:
Nachtuil wrote:I am using the affricate k͡x because I find it kind of quirky and charming I suppose. To my dismay I can't find a language where it is an actual phoneme, only ones where it is allophonic with k or x or perhaps even ç or something similar. Is there a language out there that uses it? I have scoured the list on Wikipedia linked to the affricate.
I may use it or make it an allophone too. I probably shouldn't fret about it too much as it is just a conlang but I am also just curious if it is known to be out there and why it might be so rare.

Edit: I spoke too soon. I found it in the Taa language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language
Another example, if you're still interested, is Khoekhoe. Interestingly, k͡x is in free variation with k͡ʟ̝̊ in many click languages.
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"The aspirated stops /tʰ, kʰ/ (orthographic ⟨t⟩, ⟨k⟩) are typically aspirated with velar frication [tx, kx] (they are phonetically affricates — homorganic in the case of [kx], heterorganic in the case of [tx]).[2] The velar aspiration is also found on a labialized velar [kxʷ] (orthographic ⟨kw⟩). There is variation within Navajo, however, in this respect: some dialects lack strong velar frication having instead a period of aspiration.[3][4]"
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ælfwine »

Proto-Norse also switched the "basic" word order from SOV to SVO.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Frislander wrote:
Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.
They're not entirely correlated. Balto-Slavic languages are pretty case-heavy, but they all have SVO as their main word order. Further, Finnic languages, including some of the most case-heavy languages in the world, are SVO. Na-Dené is a highly polysynthetic family where nouns are not marked for case and frequently don't mark for number either, but they are pretty rigidly verb-final.

To answer your question, then, there's little to say beyond what you can justify though historical changes. For example, independent pronouns in an SVO language grammaticalise into poly-personal marking, freeing up the word order. Alternatively an auxilliary system develops which is located in a different part of the sentence to the main verb (see Germanic languages). The apparent frequency of the SOV to SVO shift seems to be a product mostly of historical linguistic's focus on Indo-European, where the shift seems to have been a general trend within the family.

I've actually seen a paper or two which argues that Vulgar Latin was already SVO, and that is why all Romance languages are SVO.
I once saw a paper that said that "case-poor" languages tend to be SVO because the verb separates the two nouns and constituent structure is easier to figure.
But cases causing SOV, I see no reason.

Word order is quite typical areal feature. Most languages do anyway allow different word orders. So a smooth shift in frequency is easy.
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Post by Frislander »

Omzinesý wrote:
Spoiler:
Frislander wrote:
Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.
They're not entirely correlated. Balto-Slavic languages are pretty case-heavy, but they all have SVO as their main word order. Further, Finnic languages, including some of the most case-heavy languages in the world, are SVO. Na-Dené is a highly polysynthetic family where nouns are not marked for case and frequently don't mark for number either, but they are pretty rigidly verb-final.

To answer your question, then, there's little to say beyond what you can justify though historical changes. For example, independent pronouns in an SVO language grammaticalise into poly-personal marking, freeing up the word order. Alternatively an auxilliary system develops which is located in a different part of the sentence to the main verb (see Germanic languages). The apparent frequency of the SOV to SVO shift seems to be a product mostly of historical linguistic's focus on Indo-European, where the shift seems to have been a general trend within the family.

I've actually seen a paper or two which argues that Vulgar Latin was already SVO, and that is why all Romance languages are SVO.
I once saw a paper that said that "case-poor" languages tend to be SVO because the verb separates the two nouns and constituent structure is easier to figure.
But cases causing SOV, I see no reason.

Word order is quite typical areal feature. Most languages do anyway allow different word orders. So a smooth shift in frequency is easy.
Well the "no-cases = SVO" argument is hard for me to swallow given the number of caseless verb-initial languages out there (Southern Wakashan, Celtic (sort-of), pretty much the entire Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).

You also have to define what you mean by "case-marking" in this instance. What we're talking about here is the marking os core grammatical relations, but there are quite a few languages which only have case marking for non-core/oblique arguments such as locations or instruments. In this instance I'd be tempted to not count languages with only oblique case marking, since that case marking is not serving any role-marking functions to compete with word-order.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

Frislander wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:
Spoiler:
Frislander wrote:
Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.
They're not entirely correlated. Balto-Slavic languages are pretty case-heavy, but they all have SVO as their main word order. Further, Finnic languages, including some of the most case-heavy languages in the world, are SVO. Na-Dené is a highly polysynthetic family where nouns are not marked for case and frequently don't mark for number either, but they are pretty rigidly verb-final.

To answer your question, then, there's little to say beyond what you can justify though historical changes. For example, independent pronouns in an SVO language grammaticalise into poly-personal marking, freeing up the word order. Alternatively an auxilliary system develops which is located in a different part of the sentence to the main verb (see Germanic languages). The apparent frequency of the SOV to SVO shift seems to be a product mostly of historical linguistic's focus on Indo-European, where the shift seems to have been a general trend within the family.

I've actually seen a paper or two which argues that Vulgar Latin was already SVO, and that is why all Romance languages are SVO.
I once saw a paper that said that "case-poor" languages tend to be SVO because the verb separates the two nouns and constituent structure is easier to figure.
But cases causing SOV, I see no reason.

Word order is quite typical areal feature. Most languages do anyway allow different word orders. So a smooth shift in frequency is easy.
Well the "no-cases = SVO" argument is hard for me to swallow given the number of caseless verb-initial languages out there (Southern Wakashan, Celtic (sort-of), pretty much the entire Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).

You also have to define what you mean by "case-marking" in this instance. What we're talking about here is the marking os core grammatical relations, but there are quite a few languages which only have case marking for non-core/oblique arguments such as locations or instruments. In this instance I'd be tempted to not count languages with only oblique case marking, since that case marking is not serving any role-marking functions to compete with word-order.
Looks like I got some tweaking to do with my conlang as it's a case heavy VSO language.
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Post by Frislander »

LinguoFranco wrote:
Frislander wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:
Spoiler:
Frislander wrote:
Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.
They're not entirely correlated. Balto-Slavic languages are pretty case-heavy, but they all have SVO as their main word order. Further, Finnic languages, including some of the most case-heavy languages in the world, are SVO. Na-Dené is a highly polysynthetic family where nouns are not marked for case and frequently don't mark for number either, but they are pretty rigidly verb-final.

To answer your question, then, there's little to say beyond what you can justify though historical changes. For example, independent pronouns in an SVO language grammaticalise into poly-personal marking, freeing up the word order. Alternatively an auxilliary system develops which is located in a different part of the sentence to the main verb (see Germanic languages). The apparent frequency of the SOV to SVO shift seems to be a product mostly of historical linguistic's focus on Indo-European, where the shift seems to have been a general trend within the family.

I've actually seen a paper or two which argues that Vulgar Latin was already SVO, and that is why all Romance languages are SVO.
I once saw a paper that said that "case-poor" languages tend to be SVO because the verb separates the two nouns and constituent structure is easier to figure.
But cases causing SOV, I see no reason.

Word order is quite typical areal feature. Most languages do anyway allow different word orders. So a smooth shift in frequency is easy.
Well the "no-cases = SVO" argument is hard for me to swallow given the number of caseless verb-initial languages out there (Southern Wakashan, Celtic (sort-of), pretty much the entire Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).

You also have to define what you mean by "case-marking" in this instance. What we're talking about here is the marking os core grammatical relations, but there are quite a few languages which only have case marking for non-core/oblique arguments such as locations or instruments. In this instance I'd be tempted to not count languages with only oblique case marking, since that case marking is not serving any role-marking functions to compete with word-order.
Looks like I got some tweaking to do with my conlang as it's a case heavy VSO language.
That's not to say there aren't any VSO languages with case, because there are (Kwak'wala, some Salishan languages, Maasai and a few other Nilotic languages, some parts of Austronesian (sort of: the case is marked by prepositions). There's nothing wrong in having a VSO language with plenty of cases.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Frislander wrote:
Omzinesý wrote:
Spoiler:
Frislander wrote:
Isfendil wrote:
LinguoFranco wrote:Is there a general direction for word order to shift?

For example, the Romance languages have an SVO word order while Latin was SOV. I think the same thing occurred in English, IIRC. What would a VSO language become overtime, or an SVO language.

Is this shift from SOV to SVO a common occurrence or is it mostly random?
Shift in word order changes with morphology. Latin was a case heavy language, case heavy languages tend to be SOV due to the morphological weight of the noun. The romance languages are fusional and have lost cases, some of them are isolating or isolating/agglutinative, so they shifted to SVO.
They're not entirely correlated. Balto-Slavic languages are pretty case-heavy, but they all have SVO as their main word order. Further, Finnic languages, including some of the most case-heavy languages in the world, are SVO. Na-Dené is a highly polysynthetic family where nouns are not marked for case and frequently don't mark for number either, but they are pretty rigidly verb-final.

To answer your question, then, there's little to say beyond what you can justify though historical changes. For example, independent pronouns in an SVO language grammaticalise into poly-personal marking, freeing up the word order. Alternatively an auxilliary system develops which is located in a different part of the sentence to the main verb (see Germanic languages). The apparent frequency of the SOV to SVO shift seems to be a product mostly of historical linguistic's focus on Indo-European, where the shift seems to have been a general trend within the family.

I've actually seen a paper or two which argues that Vulgar Latin was already SVO, and that is why all Romance languages are SVO.
I once saw a paper that said that "case-poor" languages tend to be SVO because the verb separates the two nouns and constituent structure is easier to figure.
But cases causing SOV, I see no reason.

Word order is quite typical areal feature. Most languages do anyway allow different word orders. So a smooth shift in frequency is easy.
Well the "no-cases = SVO" argument is hard for me to swallow given the number of caseless verb-initial languages out there (Southern Wakashan, Celtic (sort-of), pretty much the entire Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).

You also have to define what you mean by "case-marking" in this instance. What we're talking about here is the marking os core grammatical relations, but there are quite a few languages which only have case marking for non-core/oblique arguments such as locations or instruments. In this instance I'd be tempted to not count languages with only oblique case marking, since that case marking is not serving any role-marking functions to compete with word-order.
I cannot remember. I can just guess what the paper said.
It was about statistical correlations. If we know that "no dependent marking of A and O" then it is more probable that "SVO" than SVO generally without knowledge of word order.
And I guess it was about dependent marking of A and O.
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