Publications

Publication details [#1913]

Byarushengo, Ernest Rugwa and Sarah Tenenbaum. 1976. Agreement and word order: A case for pragmatics in Haya. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 2 : 89–95.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject

Annotation

Though Haya has an apparently free word order (which is made possible by the presence of agreement markers in the verbal complex), it turns out to have one basic structure: S-V-IO-DO. The possible syntactic variations are all determined by pragmatic factors (the separation between old and new information being the motivation): emphasis, topicalization, focusing and/or afterthought.