Where Do Subjects Start Out in Sentences? Word Order and VPISH
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2016
- Why do different languages slot their words into sentences in different sequences? Do the subjects of sentences have to start off at the beginning of the sentence? In this week's episode, we talk about word order and the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis, or VPISH: how much variation in orders we see across languages, why having the subject start out lower down in the syntactic tree helps us capture these differences, and what other evidence we have that the subject might not start exactly where it appears.
This is Topic #71!
This week's tag language: Amharic!
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Sources:
You can find a good discussion of this topic in Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (3rd edition).
The specific examples from Irish are taken from Carnie's dissertation, which you can find here: dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/...
The Malagasy data is from Ileana Paul's thesis (cited to work by Ed Keenan, 1976, "Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy"). You can find her thesis here: publish.uwo.ca/~ileana/papers/...
Looking forward to next week!
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Māori also has a VSO word order :) e.g. kei te aroha au ki a koe, (kei te = present tense, aroha = to love, au = I, ki = to, a = vocative particle, koe = you. Great video! :)
I'm always so excited when you talk about Irish.
It's a cool language! We'll try to get it more often. ^_^
UP! I love that film, better watch it again.
Thank you very much for making this video! It was really interesting to talk about word order in difference language. Good job!
☺
Thanks! Glad you liked it. And yeah, Up is a very fun movie. ^_^
...great video! I will point it out to my students in my next syntax class!
supportive greetings from Konstanz, Germany
Thanks so much! I hope they get a lot of use out of it. ^_^
This is all of the stuff that I forgot from when I took Syntax as an undergrad 6 years ago
Glad to be able to give you a refresher, then! ^_^
This is all of the stuff that I forgot when I took Syntax as an undergrad last year 😂
Hi Moti,
I have just started watching your amazing videos some weeks ago in order to improve my English. They are very interested and the design and graphics are very good. The sound on the other hand has a way to improve. It's better than in the firsts videos but it is far away from the quality of the images. The oral information in your works is indeed important so we all appreciate if you take care of this aspect.
Congratulations and please carry on with this channel.
Inigo a Spaniard Basque learning English.
Thanks for the feedback! We will keep working on it. We're at VidCon now and trying to learn more! Hopefully we'll be improving soon. ^_^
Thanks for this video! I have a Syntax paper to write and it's so hard to find clear and concise explanations of VPISH.
Great to see an gaeilge represented!
Thanks! It's a good topic for it - there's a good amount of research around the language because of VSO syntax stuff. ^_^
Is that an Argentinian football t-shirt? haha. Thanks for your information Moti!
As a Russian language speaker, I find English word order quite hard sometimes. Sometimes I don't know how to say something in English properly. Word order in Russian works differently.
Hmm... when you were studying, did they give you sentence templates to work with? It's hard for me to appreciate the difficulty of English, as it's my birth language, but when I studied Chinese they introduced these templates or patterns for the most common sentence types.
BTW your English writing, even as of 6 years ago, is spot-on. Kudos to you!
@@hoi-polloi1863 I believe they did. But Russian has cases, genders and the agreement between nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles, etc. Word order does not affect meaning that much: Я люблю тебя, тебя я люблю, люблю я тебя means are all the same «I love you». However, word order in Russian is not really free. It's used for topic and comment. Usually Russian sentence starts from topic and ends by comment.
I'm not used to use word order for conveying syntax. When I speak my native language I put a topic of a sentence first, then put a comment. All the syntax usually covered by case endings. Even when I speak English I'm trying to do the same and in fact English allows this thanks to prepositions but sometimes it does not. Often it's easy to fix, but sometimes it's just a real challenge.
Is that a Newell's Old Boys' Argentine football T-shirt???
It is! I was wondering if anyone would notice that. ^_^
If the subject starts out in the verb phrase, why is VSO word order relatively uncommon? Seems like it would take more effort to always have to move the subject out of the verb phrase.
Fascinating question! It's worth noting that if nothing moved at all, we'd expect SVO or SOV most, rather than VSO, because the subject sits in that very first position, the specifier, in the verb phrase. Beyond that, I checked in with Stephan as well on this, who wrote this episode, and while neither of us have any *special* insight into this question, here's some interesting information he turned up on the topic, anyway:
So, in explaining the relative frequencies of word orders across the world's languages (41% SOV, 35% SVO, 7% VSO, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures), we could take a functionalist approach, where explanations might revolve around how difficult or easy it is to move things around in a sentence. If we did this, we'd naively expect exactly what we see: if SVO and SOV languages generally leave everything in place, whereas VSO languages move the verb into a higher position, the latter order should be much less common than the first two.
Assuming for the sake of discussion, though, that most SVO/SOV languages are actually like English and French, where both subjects and (sometimes) verbs move out of the verb phrase, we'd expect them to be much *less* common than languages like Irish, which only move their verbs. So, a functionalist approach no longer works.
If we think about the problem in terms of parameters, though, we see something really interesting. In discussing how theoretical syntax and typology interact, linguists Mark Baker and Jim McCloskey (2007) point out that the basic word order differences between these languages can largely be attributed to just 3 choices: whether heads precede their complements, whether the verb moves out of the VP, and whether the subject moves out of the VP. If each of these switches has a 50/50 chance of going in either direction, then we calculate that 50% of languages should be SOV, 37.5% should be SVO, and 12.5% should be VSO.
So, without even taking into account other parameters, or how such choices might interact with functionalist pressures, the predicted proportions are already pretty close to what we actually see! Neat! ^_^
So word order doesn’t matter once you have another way to mark subject, verb and object?
Hey! Where'd your Neal Stephenson books go?!
We just try to cycle books around on the shelves occasionally, to mix up the backdrop some. They're fine, and they'll be back eventually, I'm sure. ^_^
Hi Moti! I was taught that subjects are generated in SpecVP-position because of theta role assignment and are subsequently raised to SpecIP-position to get licensed (case assignment). If that's true (because I'm not completely sure), why can the subject in Irish remain inside the VP? Where does it get licensed? Normally it would be because of a finite verb in I-position licensing the subject via Spec-Head Agreement, but that isn't possible if the subject remains in SpecVP-position, right?. I hope I'm not asking a stupid question.
(PS: Are you a follower of generative grammar or do you think that there is a theory that does a better job of explaining the syntax of the world's languages?)
You're right that this is an issue. Here's a somewhat long paper on it: dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/PDF/Thesis/Thesischapter3VSO2.pdf
Thank you! I shall have a look :D
This is a good question! And the response that's given from Carnie's thesis gets into this in a bunch of detail, and some more nuance, with agreement projections and the like. But here's a basic answer for your question that I think makes the point pretty well.
So, we haven't talked much about case yet, but you're right: we usually think of case as being assigned in the specifier position of the Inflectional Phrase. The other place we see case assigned is in the complement position of the verb phrase. In general, a noun phrase has to be in one of these two spots to get case, because it needs to be "close enough" to whatever's assigning it.
One way to get around the problem of Irish would be to say that the subject *does* move into the specifier position of the IP, after all. We'd then have to say that Irish's VSO word order is derived by movement of the verb to an even *higher* position, like the complementizer position that we see verbs move into during question formation in English and French (the head of a CP). But this *can't* be right, since we still see VSO word order in Irish when the complementizer position is filled with an actual complementizer! This blocks movement of the verb into a higher position.
Duirt mé gur phóg Máire an lucharachán
Said I that kissed Mary the leprechaun
I said that Mary kissed the leprechaun
So the verb can't be moving higher than the IP node. But we actually have reason to believe that a subject in the specifier position of a verb phrase can get case from the head of the IP, without having to move around. Considering a more precise definition of "close enough" (see government back on Wikipedia in Government and Binding Theory), it isn't only the complement of some head that can get case, but the specifier of that complement, too. In other words, a subject inside a VP can get case from up above. And this is something we see sometimes in English! In the sentence "Ellie wants him to visit Paradise Falls," we can see that the lower subject "him" is in its accusative form, suggesting it's actually getting case from "want," even though it's in the specifier of that verb's complement (the specifier of that lower IP). This phenomenon is known as "exceptional case marking."
It looks like whether subjects move to get case, or can just stay put, might actually be a parameter along which languages can vary. In English, subjects have to move, but in Irish they get what they need without having to!
Ah, that makes sense! Thank you! I did read about exceptional case marking for my syntax course, so I'm a bit disappointed in myself for not seeing that the Irish example was similar to that, but I'm glad that I have an explanation now :)
Sure, you're welcome! And I just realized I didn't answer the latter part to your question. Yeah, we are pretty firmly in generative syntax land, too. We obviously haven't solved all the problems yet, but there's a lot of good stuff in there, and I think we should keep working along those lines. ^_^
Why do you have a NOB football jersey? Have you ever been to Argentina?
The next episode link hasn't been added yet on this video.
Thanks! We've fixed it now. ^_^
I LIKE VPISH.
Yeah, it's a pretty good hypothesis! Glad it caught your attention. ^_^
Even better, it works!
So could this be a rest from the original languages? That Proto-World (if it existed) had the subject inside the verb-phrase?
Yeah, that is possible for sure! This hypothesis is the sort of thing that both looks to be borne out by data, and also to be able to explain a lot of variation we can see between languages. If so, and if it's a deeply rooted feature across languages, then we might well hypothesize that it really could go that far back, assuming there are languages back there for us to look at. ^_^
Thank you for the answer. Will you please do an episode on Animacy, and why calling a trans person "it" is ungrammatical. :o)
Oh yeah, that's a good idea, and I'm adding it to our topic list. Thanks! ^_^
I don't understand why there are only few languages with VOS or OVS structure. I try to imagine that as a baby, we would identify any event as a whole "thing" or object. For example, in the event of eating an apple, we would just describe it "Apple-eating!" Then this evolved into "Apple eat!" or "Eating the apple!" And finally, we learned to be more specific by adding a pronoun "Apple eating I am!" or "Eating the apple I am!"
Why is this not the case in grammar tho? Or did I confuse the meaning of subject and object? Or maybe babies actually learn about the object the last?
For me at least, "always" can't be used as a sentence adverb. Like it sounds pretty much as ungrammatical as a sentence can be (without being nonsense).
I'm just not sure predicates are a thing.
A VP without a verb is still a VP? I don't get it.
I think he miscolored the trace under V. It's not the NP moving, but the V moving to the I(nfl) head.
Yep, that's right. That's how we're capturing the VSO order - the subject's inside the VP, and the verb has moved out. Thanks!
Why are you wearing a jersey from an Argie football team? Is it because of Messi?
So the story behind the shirt is as follows: I found it when I lived in Japan at a shop for like 1000 yen, and I liked it, so I picked it up. I didn't know for several years that it was a football shirt! Then I wore it to an informal talk with David Embick, a morphologist from Penn, and he told me what it was; he'd spent some time in Argentina, and he recognized it. After that, I looked into the team some, and they seemed fine, so I decided, why not go for it? ^_^