Interaction between word order and argument marking in seven unrelated languages: Tuvan, Lao, Figuig Berber, Itonama, Savosavo, Madurese and Santali

The origin of the research idea of this thesis comes from a feature discovered through fieldwork on Bugis, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language. In this language, two different word orders are possible: in the basic order, different affixes occur on the verb and the arguments, while the non basic order receives no marking. The goal of this thesis is to examine some unrelated languages in order to find out if, with different word orders, there is any difference in marking. Seven languages belonging to different families and areas have been chosen for this purpose: Tuvan (South Siberian Turkic), Lao (Tai, Tai-Kadai), Figuig Berber (Berber, Afroasiatic), Itonama (Amazonian isolate), Savosavo (Papuan), Madurese (Western Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian) and Santali (Munda, Austroasiatic). The obtained results indicate that most languages show some different marking with different word orders, and a few languages that do not, have a rigid word order that does not allow changes. The...Show moreThe origin of the research idea of this thesis comes from a feature discovered through fieldwork on Bugis, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language. In this language, two different word orders are possible: in the basic order, different affixes occur on the verb and the arguments, while the non basic order receives no marking. The goal of this thesis is to examine some unrelated languages in order to find out if, with different word orders, there is any difference in marking. Seven languages belonging to different families and areas have been chosen for this purpose: Tuvan (South Siberian Turkic), Lao (Tai, Tai-Kadai), Figuig Berber (Berber, Afroasiatic), Itonama (Amazonian isolate), Savosavo (Papuan), Madurese (Western Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian) and Santali (Munda, Austroasiatic). The obtained results indicate that most languages show some different marking with different word orders, and a few languages that do not, have a rigid word order that does not allow changes. The changes in marking are not as obvious as in Bugis except in Madurese, which shows a high interaction between marking and word order. Moreover, the fact that clauses with the basic word order receive more marking occurs also in Figuig Berber. Further research with many more languages would be needed in order to discover if this feature may be common cross linguistically, given that the low number of the studied languages does not allow cross linguistic generalisations.Show less

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Interaction between word order and argument marking in seven unrelated languages: Tuvan, Lao, Figuig Berber, Itonama, Savosavo, Madurese and Santali