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Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you : on the typological similarities of object-initial languages

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Author

  • Thomas Rosholm

Summary, in English

The thesis examined typological similarities across the fifteen languages listed on the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) website as having object-initial constituent orders in transitive clauses. Based on previous work by Derbyshire (1981, 1987) and Andersen (1988), who have attempted to account for diachronic developments in Hixkaryana and Päri respectively, a matrix was created to check relevant grammatical features for their diachronic accounts against the other object-initial languages entered into WALS.

Ultimately, OSV languages did not perform very well on the matrix but there were strong results for OVS languages. The strongest features, in terms of describing all the OVS languages, were verb-agreement with syntactic roles accompanied by either flexible constituent order or frequently omitted nominals, but ergativity was also very prevalent among the languages.

Publishing year

2016

Language

English

Document type

Student publication for Bachelor's degree

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures

Supervisor

  • Arthur Holmer (docent)