Verb Subject Object

8 Key excerpts on "Verb Subject Object"

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  Subject Positions and Interfaces

  The Case of European Portuguese

  • João Costa(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  34 Postverbal subjects: syntax and discourse – VSO and VOS orders From the tests above, I conclude that in VOS context, subjects occupy the Spec,VP position. The difference between VSO and VOS will be derived in terms of object scrambling in the latter, in accordance with the evidence to be presented in section 3. A comparison between the scrambling analysis and an analysis involving remnant-IP movement, along the lines of Kayne (1998) will provide further evidence in favor of the claim that subjects in VOS are in Spec, VP. At this point, it is possible to tell which position the subject occupies in each of the attested word orders. The conclusions reached so far are the following: 1. Preverbal subjects occupy the Spec,IP position; like all other arguments, it can be left-dislocated in some contexts. 2. Postverbal subjects in VSO context may be in Spec, VP 3. Postverbal subjects in VOS without intonation break between the object and the subject are in Spec, VP In the next section, the position of objects in VOS sentences, which is cru-cial for the analysis of this word order, will be discussed. 3.3. Objects in VOS: Scrambling in European Portuguese In the preceding section, I have assumed without providing arguments that Portuguese VOS orders involve object scrambling across the subject. In this section, I will motivate that assumption, arguing that it is possible to identify similarities between scrambling in European Portuguese and the well-known scrambling configurations in Dutch and German. In order to achieve this goal, I will first show some properties of scrambling in Dutch and German. This will establish the grounds for a comparison between Portuguese and Dutch/German, and determine how to trace scrambling in a VO language. As mentioned in the previous section, if the scrambling analysis is on the right track, there will be further evidence in favor of the claim that the sub-ject may be stranded in Spec, VP in EP.

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  Topics in Oceanic Morphosyntax

  • Claire Moyse-Faurie, Joachim Sabel, Claire Moyse-Faurie, Joachim Sabel(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Part one: Sentential syntax and sentence types Deriving linear order in OV/VO languages: evidence from Oceanic languages Joachim Sabel 1. Introduction VOS/VSO languages often show mirror image ordering with respect to word order phenomena in the predicate phrase and in DP compared to SOV/SVO lan-guages. This will be illustrated with respect to adverb/PP/adjective order, double objects and on the basis of data on focus/background (information) structure. It will be shown that a unified analysis for these phenomena in SOV/SVO/VOS languages based on the parametric option of having either roll-up or head move-ment, as has been proposed in the literature, is incompatible with data found in Oceanic VOS languages such as Fijian (i.e., the North-West Viti Levu vari-ant) and Kiribati (Gilbertese). Although many languages linearize arguments and adjuncts in the predicate phrase in a unitary way, Kiribati and North-West Fijian use different strategies for arguments in double object constructions and for adjuncts. The following generalizations concerning adjunct/argument order are for-mulated: Adverbs, PP-adverbials and adjectives following the head they modify appear in inverted order compared to adjuncts preceding the head. The order of arguments (in double object constructions) is determined independently of the order of adjuncts. The theoretical consequences of the empirical generalizations for analyses deriving linear order in SOV/SVO and verb-initial languages are discussed. Another new generalization of the present study of word order is that all Austronesian verb-initial languages that will be discussed realize informational focus in a position preceding background in the post-verbal domain. In this re-spect, the verb-initial VO-languages differ from SVO and SOV languages which are all focus-final.

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  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  do-support.

  Spotlight: Flexible word order: Latin

  Constituent order plays a more important role in determining argument structure in English than in many other languages. In Latin, for example, a rich system of case marking on nouns allowed for much freer order of subject and object NPs and VPs. The default or unmarked word order was subject–object–verb (SOV), but other orders, conveying the same information but with slightly different emphasis, were also possible.

  In the examples below, the subject lupus (‘wolf’) is marked as nominative (subject), and the object gallinam (‘hen’) is marked as accusative (direct object), which allows the simple sentence ‘The wolf sees the hen’ to be expressed in six different orders:

  1   Lupus gallinam videt. (SOV)

  2   Gallinam lupus videt. (OSV)

  3   Videt lupus gallinam. (VSO)

  4   Videt gallinam lupus. (VOS)

  5   Gallinam videt lupus. (OVS)

  6   Lupus videt gallinam. (SVO)

  Government and agreement

  As we have seen, sentences are both ordered and hierarchically structured. In many languages, the relationships between elements within a phrase or sentence are formally marked. In English, for example, the form of the demonstrative adjectives this and that must agree with its noun for number:

  •   This dog

  •   These dogs

  •   That house

  •   Those houses

  This marking of relationships is known as agreement or concord, and often affects items at some distance from each other in a sentence. In the following example, the third person singular form requests is required to mark agreement with the head of the complex subject noun phrase (boy):

  •   The boy with the long unwashed hair whom you met at a party last Friday requests the pleasure of your daughter’s company.

  Formal agreement marking in modern English is relatively limited: verbs, with the exception of to be

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  Brazilian Sign Language Studies

  • Ronice Müller de Quadros(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, Felipe (1989) and Ferreira-Brito (1995) claimed that even though there is certain flexibility, there seems to be a predominant order, to wit: SVO. We are going to support their intuition by presenting some sentences with adverbs, modals, negation and subordination; and by discussing their respective word orders. Most of the data is from Quadros (1999) and we also adopt the theoretical analysis proposed there, with a few adaptations. First of all, we have to find out what the possible word orders are in Libras. According to Greenberg’s (1996) typology, languages may exhibit six different orders: SVO, SOV, OSV, VOS, OVS and VSO. Quadros (1999) provides examples of SVO, SOV and OSV sentences. Arrotéia (2003) shows a specific context in which VOS order emerges in Libras. No OVS and VSO sentences have been documented in the language so far. 2.1 Underlying order of verb, subject and object In order to identify which is the underlying word order, we have to look at the contexts in which each of the possibilities emerges, and also the restrictions. To start the analysis, let us compare three different transitive sentences and how they behave in different orders. The first sentence contains a plain verb (no morphological agreement) and arguments that are semantically distinct. The second sentence contains the same verb but the arguments have the same semantic features, so they can be considered reversible arguments (both can be the subject or the object of the sentence). Finally, we analyze a sentence with a non-plain verb, which is a verb that shows morphological agreement

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  Basic Word Order (RLE Linguistics B: Grammar)

  Functional Principles

  • Russell S Tomlin(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  In SVO and SOV languages, placement of modals that would separate the object from the verb are forbidden. English can be used to illustrate the general pattern: Steele catalogues a substantial number of SVO languages that follow this pattern: Modal placement in SOV languages tends also to be consistent with VOB:

  However, in VSO languages, modal elements may sometimes, as in (82), separate the object from the verb. But if modal elements do separate the object from the verb in some language, they also separate the subject and verb:

  Steele provides no data concerning VOS languages, but in Toba Batak modals precede the verb obligatorily:

  Finally, Steele’s analysis of Thai is not complete. While most modals in Thai do precede the verb, there are several which may follow it. However, these modal elements must follow the entire VO complex. Thus, the one example that varies from the general patterns Steele observes varies from those patterns in a manner totally consistent with VOB.

  Proverbal Replacements

  It is possible in some languages to replace a verb+object phrase by a proverbal form. In no case has it been observed that a proverbal form can replace a subject+verb phrase in a transitive clause. If there were no special syntactic relationship between object and verb, there should be an equal possibility of observing either verb-object or verb-subject proverbal replacements. The data reveal, however, that there is not an equal possibility for each type of proverbal replacement. Therefore, some special relationship must exist between verb and object. The VOB principle states what the relationship is.

  Illustrative data for proverbal replacement comes from English: Movement Constraints

  The data presented in this section demonstrate the cohesiveness of verb and object (as opposed to verb and subject) with respect to their sensitivity to movement rules. In the case below there is a movement rule sensitive to the bond between object and verb, but no parallel evidence of any such sensitivity to a verb-subject relationship. As in the cases above, this behavior can be explained by the VOB principle.

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  Contrastive Studies in Morphology and Syntax

  • Michalis Georgiafentis, Giannoula Giannoulopoulou, Maria Koliopoulou, Angeliki Tsokoglou, Michalis Georgiafentis, Giannoula Giannoulopoulou, Maria Koliopoulou, Angeliki Tsokoglou(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It is well known that subject inversion is more productive in Spanish than in Italian (Lobo and Martins 2017 ; Leonetti 2017). This is essentially due to the constraints that Italian places on inversion with transitive verbs. On the one hand, VOS is mostly used in Italian with narrow focus – possibly contrastive – on the final subject, whereas it can also be used with wide focus readings in Spanish – though narrow focus on the subject remains the preferred interpretation. On the other hand, the VSO pattern is usually excluded in Italian, as it is in French and Catalan, but is quite common in Spanish, European Portuguese and Romanian (Leonetti 2014b). In VSO order, the subject must be focal, but it does not receive a narrow focus interpretation (unless the object is right-dislocated; we consider only Spanish sequences with no intonational breaks, i.e. without dislocations): VSO is associated to an interpretation that lacks informational Focus/background articulation, typically a wide focus reading. Significant differences between Spanish and Italian show up when the postverbal subject pronoun is within the focal domain without being a narrow focus. The VSO pattern is usually acceptable in Spanish, but not in Italian, as shown in the contrasts in (11)–(13). The presence of overt subject pronouns in Spanish VSO raises an interesting question: why do they appear there? They may well contribute to solving possible ambiguities in some cases, when verbal inflection is not explicit enough (Fernández Soriano 1999 : §19.3.6), and may also give rise to mild emphatic and contrastive effects in other cases (Fernández Soriano 1999 : §19.3.7), but such factors cannot definitely explain all uses, because in many examples the pronoun is neither emphatic nor contrastive (for instance, in (11)a and (13)a)

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  Order, Concord, and Constituency

  • Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey K. Pullum(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  (Universal 12) Adjectives follow their noun. (Universal 17) The only claim made with regard to VSO languages in Greenberg (1963) that does not hold true of Irish is Universal (6), which maintains that all languages which have dominant VSO order have SVO as an alternative order. 3 This possibility does not exist in Irish under any circumstances. Examples like (10) are fully ungrammatical: 4 ( 10) *Mo mhâthair chonaic mé my mother saw me' 'My mother saw me.' For discussion and illustration of these and other aspects of word-order in Irish, see Sommerfelt (1965), Ward (1974), Stenson (1976), McCloskey (1979,1980a). 5 The general conclusion must be that Irish is a VSO language par excellence, and the question of whether or not it can have a VP will be consequently controversial and of some interest. 2. THE PROGRESSIVE CONSTRUCTION The progressive aspect in Irish is expressed by means of the structure illustrated in (11) and exemplified in (12): (11) Verb to be Subject Progressive Form of V Object PP (12) Tâ sé ag tôgâil tithe i nDoire is he build (PROG) houses in Derry 'He is building houses in Derry.' James McClosKey 13 What I will call the 'progressive form' of the verb is constructed from the verbal noun (VN) by prefixing to it a particle represented in spelling as ag. Orthographically and historically this particle is identical to the preposition meaning roughly 'at'. Following the progressive verb, the order of elements is as usual — that is, the direct object, if there is one, will normally immediately follow the verb, and will in turn be followed by PP's and adverbials. The conditions that control the ordering of these elements are exactly the same as those that hold in the case of a finite clause. A further characteristic of the construction should be noted. Pedagogic grammars normally require that the direct object of a progressive verb be in the genitive case.

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  The Clausal Structure of Spanish

  A Comparative Study

  • Francisco Ordonez(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter I have shown certain asymmetries between objects and subjects in the orders V O S and V S O in Spanish. The asymmetries in quantifier binding and Principle C between the two orders were explained by having the hierarchical relation between subjects and objects reversed, implying that objects C-command subjects only in the V O S order. This relation could only be obtained by moving the O to the left to some higher inflectional projection and having the subject in a lower position. The ban on wh-objects in situ in the V O S order was reduced to a ban on scrambling wh-in situ. The obligatory specific interpretation of the indefinite object in V O S order was seen as a consequence of the effects of scrambling on indefinites. The restriction of subject pronouns to the V S O order was explained by their semi-clitic nature which forces them to scramble to the left. Finally, the impossibility of having an empty counterpart of the dative clitic in the V IO S order was reduced to the fact that the conditions for licensing this empty category are not met in the landing site for scrambled XPs . In evcry case support for a scrambling account is found.

  This conclusion implies that the altemation S O and O S found in verb final languages like Korean, Hindi and German needs to be extended to languages where this alternation is obtained post-verbally such as Spanish. In principle, there is little reason why the same basic altemation should have two different analyses in UG (scrambling of the object to the left in verb final languages and adjunction of the subject to the right in nonverb final languages). The introduction of functional projections in the syntactic trees (Pollock 1989) and the hypothesis of verb movement (Emonds 1978), made scrambling a plausible analysis for nonverb final languages. It can therefore provide this uniform account. From the particular perspective of Spanish, it has also been shown that this analysis is empirically superior to the alternative Right Adjunction Hypothesis.

  Finally, our analysis, contrary to the free inversion hypothesis, conforms with and supports the line of research put forward by Kayne (1994), which derives linear order from hierarchical structure. This is done by what he calls the “Linear Correspondence Axiom” (LCA) which maps asymmetric C-command into linear precedence. Since the mapping is done into linear precedence, no right-adjunction is generated in syntactic trees.

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