Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

Well, as a first and over-simplified stab at a complex subject, how about
this. A speaker, when composing a sentence, thinks on two levels. One is
basically a pragmatic level in terms of information structure, focus and
topic, and this is the primary determinant of word order. A second is a
syntactic level which determines possible syntactically acceptable ways of
saying the sentence. The speaker then attempts to find a syntactic
possibility which matches the preferred word order. In colloquial speech (I
am thinking of English now) it is quite common to hear sentences starting
with an object which then ends up in a left displaced position. In writing
and more careful speech other strategies are used e.g. passives to get the
syntax to produce the desired word order, or else the word order may be
modified if necessary if the syntax doesn't allow what the pragmatics is
looking for.

But I can hardly claim that my off the cuff thoughts can rival the
collective wisdom of a whole dynasty of Chomskys!

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-hebrew-
> bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Dave Washburn
> Sent: 29 May 2003 21:22
> To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] V2 (was VSO vs. SVO)
> 
> On Thursday 29 May 2003 12:43, Peter Kirk wrote:
> > The fact of language is variation in constituent order. Constituent
> > movement is a concept which depends on a hypothesis of one of the many
> > Chomskys, that there is an underlying deep structure relative to which
> > constituents may be moved in the surface structure. This hypothesis has
> not
> > been proved, indeed it is probably unprovable. It may have proved
> > productive for the analysis of some languages, but that does not imply
> that
> > it has any cross-linguistic reality and is relevant to all languages.
> 
> Okay, how does variation in constituent order within the same language
> come
> about?  Does a language speaker store a nearly-infinite list of possible
> constituent orders in his or her brain and sift through the whole mess to
> formulate even the simplest of clauses?  Movement accounts for variation
> in
> constituent order in a much simpler way that corresponds much more closely
> to
> what we know of how the brain works, and it has not just "proved
> productive
> for the analysis of some languages," it has proven productive for both
> analysis, explanation and teaching of hundreds of languages, and actually
> fits the way that native speakers of any number of languages describe
> their
> own processes of forming clauses.  There will always be nay-sayers, but
> ISTM
> that movement has made a strong case for itself.
> 
> > So let's reformulate the question: why does Hebrew position the verb at
> the
> > front when creating a so-called waw-consecutive clause, and why does it
> > front the subject when creating a qatal/yiqtol clause? But that has
> turned
> > an oversimplifying yes/no question into a rather more complex one.
> 
> Complexity isn't necessarily a bad thing.  So what's your answer to this
> question?
> 
> --
> Dave Washburn
> http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur