Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility
Editor
For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a “basic” order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the “basic” order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of “basic”, with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfulness. This work asserts that explanatory factors behind word order variation go beyond the syntactic and are to be found in studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming information. Thus three domains must be distinguished in understanding order variation: syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic. The works in this volume explore various aspects of this assertion.
[Typological Studies in Language, 22] 1992. viii, 320 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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IntroductionDoris L. Payne | p. 1
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Is basic word order universal?Marianne Mithun | p. 15
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Basic word order in two “free word order” languagesKenneth L. Hale | p. 63
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The privilege of primacy: experimental data and cognitive explanationsMorton Ann Gernsbacher and David Hargreaves | p. 83
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Information distribution in OjibwaRussell S. Tomlin and Richard A. Rhodes | p. 117
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Nonidentifiable information and pragmatic order rules in ‘O’odhamDoris L. Payne | p. 137
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Word order in KlamathKaren Sundberg Meyer | p. 167
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Word order and topicality in Nez PerceNoel Rude | p. 193
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Verb-subject order in PolishBarbara Jacennik and Matthew S. Dryer | p. 209
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The pragmatics of word order variation in Chamorro narrative textAnn Cooreman | p. 243
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Word order and temporal sequencingJohn Myhill | p. 265
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Word order and discourse type: an Austronesian exampleJ. Stephen Quakenbush | p. 279
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On interpreting text-distributional correlations: some methodological issuesT. Givón | p. 305
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General