Lecture 18

Question 1

Roles in the sentence

Answer 1

Subject- who is it?

Object- what is it about

Verb/predicate-

Sometimes these roles are expressed in the internal structure of the word
Sometimes they are expressed by the order of words
Sometimes both

Question 2

Verb contains information on

Answer 2

Subject or

Subject and object

Question 3

Possible word orders

Answer 3

Subject (S) + Verb (V) + Object(O)

-SVO
-SOV
-VSO
-VOS
-OVS
-OSV

Question 4

Fixed word orders

Answer 4

Order of the words are important for the sentence to be grammatically correct

English has a relatively fixed order as well as French, chatino, and choktaw

Question 5

Flexible word orders

Answer 5

The order of the words can move around flexibly without making the sentence ungrammatical or changing the meaning

Question 6

Word order in Cree

Answer 6

• non-configurational polysynthetic language
  
  • free word order
  • words consist of many morphemes (one word can be a whole sentence)

-all 6 possible word orders allowed in all dialects except east Cree where OSV is ungrammatical

-grammatical subjects and objects are expressed by morphological markers within verbal complex which makes it seem like the subject and object noun phrases are freely omitted

Question 7

Order in free word order

Answer 7

Just because there is “free word order” doesn’t mean some word orders seem more natural than others

There can also be other <semantic> motivations for word order and putting elements at the start of the sentence</semantic>

Focus: new contrastive meaning, something you wanna emphasize

Topic: thing ur talking bout

Question 8

Actors/ agents

Answer 8

Subjects in active sentence

Question 9

Languages which have a relatively free word order often have semantic or pragmatic constraints

Answer 9

Focus
Topic, etc

Question 10

Languages which have a relatively free word order may have a preferential word order (that is more naturally used)

Answer 10

Secwepemctsin has a tendency to place the verb or predicate in first position in the sentence

Question 11

Some indigenous languages have a set word order

Answer 11

-ex. Lakota and Dakota have SOV order

• ie. when there is both a subject and object noun phrases present, they both precede the verb

-And the subject is placed before the object