- 08/02/2013
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
OSV typology observation in comparison to SVO type. Usage of OSV typology in the languages, which are generally considered SVO
OSV is one of the language types, which is met quiet rarely and often regarded to as Object Agent Verb (OAV). One of the best examples of this language and word order types could be Southern American language Savant and other languages of the local Brazilian tribes, which dwelled there before the Conquistadors. We could also fin this type of the word order in the Southern Europe, for example in the Sardinian variant of the Italian language and Yiddish. The construction in the both languages is generally used to make a stress on the object and the structures of such type are sometimes used in the English language. Traditionally it is used in the Future tense or with the but conjunction, for example in the sentences: “To Rome I shall go!”, “I hate oranges, but apples I’ll eat!” and in the subordinate attributive sentences, where direct and indirect object is relative pronoun (a good example would be “What I do is my own business”. The word order in American gesture language is also corresponding to the OAV type of classification. And one more illustration is subjunctive mood in the Chinese language is also using this structure: – could be translated as “An orange by me is eaten”, where (orange) is an object, (I) — is regarded in Chinese like a subject, (eat) – is regarded to as a verb predicate.
The linguists consider this language type to be quite often meet within some artificially created language, for example in Teonaht, and very often is chosen by the language inventors due the extraordinary and outstanding phonation. The changed version of this typology style is used by Master Yoda in the “Star Wars” movie and that makes the viewer understand at once that he is foreign-speaker.
Comparatively with SVO type we see how rarely is used OSV type, but the same time the peculiar counting makes it attractive for creation of unusual imagery in books and cinematography. As it was mentioned earlier we could also meet this typological style within the traditionally SVO regarded languages, which gives wide variety to the construction of these languages and characterize them as perfectly developed.
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Conclusion
In the end I would like to make a stress on the fact that the recent studies revealed that the spread of SVO languages is observed right now, but the developmental process of the language study revealed that later it was not so widely spread: “The fact that SVO, now a common order in Europe and around the Mediterranean, was less common in the past: on the one hand, there were SOV languages like Latin and Etruscan in western Europe; on the other hand, there were many VSO languages in what is now the Middle East represented both by Semitic languages and by Egyptian” (Dryer, 2005). It goes without saying that the development of contemporary SVO languages could later transform in some other type of language and it would be essential in the field of language study. That is why a number of contemporary linguists try to reveal the mechanism of historical development of the language to understand what could be the future perspective for the development of the languages. It goes without saying that they have only written material and this significantly prevents the development of the theoretical basis.
References:
– Maddieson, Ian. Locus of Marking: Whole-Language Typology. in Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures, pp. 106–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
– Matthew S. Dryer. Order of Subject, Object, and Verb. The World Atlas of Language Structures, edited by Martin Haspelmath. 2005
– Kaius Sinnemäki. Word order in zero-marking languages: A typological study. University of Helsinki. 2009
– Johanna Nichols and Balthasar Bickel. Locus of Marking: Whole-language Typology The World Atlas of Language Structures, edited by Martin Haspelmath. 2005
– Mieko Ueno and Maria Polinsky. Does headedness affect processing?A new look at the VO–OV contrast. Cambridge University Press 2009
– Dryer, Matthew S. Word order. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Clause structure, language typology and syntactic description, 2nd edn., vol. 1, 61–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.2007
– Kaius Sinnemäki. Languages with SOV word order and no morphological marking of core arguments. University of Helsinki. 2006
– Dryer, M. 1992. The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations. Language 68: 81-138.
– Gibson, Edward 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68:176.
– Khanittanan, W. 1986. Kamti Tai: from an SVO to an SOV Language. In B.H. Krishnamurti (ed.), South Asian Linguistics Structure, Convergence and Diglossia, pp. 17-48. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
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