>> Well, maybe and maybe not, particularly for Hebrew. The main
>> reason that it is often asserted that Hebrew order is VSO is
>> because of the predominance of the wayyiqtol form in the Bible.
>> This does not mean, however, that VSO was the "normal" word order
>> in conversational classical hebrew was VSO, merely that in
>> narrative prose that's the order we have preserved most often. My
>> own view is that the wayyiqtol is the result of a transformation
>> that moves the verb to first position from a "base" SVO order. But
>> that's just my view.
> From: "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu>
> I took a couple of classes in my graduate student days in
> linguistics at UM with a fellow who studied at MIT with Chomsky and
> indeed was a Chomsky clone. He was of the opinion, and taught, that
> every language was at its base SVO. He had a slew of proofs. I
> wrote a paper taking each one of the proofs of SVO and showed that
> biblical Hebrew was VSO at its core. (Someone else showed it for
> Welsh.)
I didn't get too far into syntax, but I know that some theories
have problems with a fundamental or "deep" VSO word order,
because V-O is usually considered to be a constituent, while
V-S and S-O aren't usually considered to be hierarchical
constituents.