The Ling Space | Where Do Subjects Start Out in Sentences? Word Order and VPISH @thelingspace | Uploaded 8 years ago | Updated 2 hours ago
Why do different languages slot their words into sentences in different sequences? Do the subjects of sentences have to start off at the beginning of the sentence? In this week's episode, we talk about word order and the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis, or VPISH: how much variation in orders we see across languages, why having the subject start out lower down in the syntactic tree helps us capture these differences, and what other evidence we have that the subject might not start exactly where it appears.
This is Topic #71!
This week's tag language: Amharic!
Related episodes:
Happy Little Trees: Syntactic Trees and X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
Goldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Last episode:
Sound Wave Hissy Fit: The Acoustics of Stops and Fricatives - youtu.be/iEc8nZkn258
Other of our syntax videos:
Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Referential Treatment: Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement and Traces - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-71
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
You can find a good discussion of this topic in Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (3rd edition).
The specific examples from Irish are taken from Carnie's dissertation, which you can find here: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/Thesishome.html
The Malagasy data is from Ileana Paul's thesis (cited to work by Ed Keenan, 1976, "Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy"). You can find her thesis here: http://publish.uwo.ca/~ileana/papers/dissertation.pdf
Looking forward to next week!
Why do different languages slot their words into sentences in different sequences? Do the subjects of sentences have to start off at the beginning of the sentence? In this week's episode, we talk about word order and the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis, or VPISH: how much variation in orders we see across languages, why having the subject start out lower down in the syntactic tree helps us capture these differences, and what other evidence we have that the subject might not start exactly where it appears.
This is Topic #71!
This week's tag language: Amharic!
Related episodes:
Happy Little Trees: Syntactic Trees and X' Theory - youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg
Goldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - youtu.be/thFkoo1YmW0
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g
Last episode:
Sound Wave Hissy Fit: The Acoustics of Stops and Fricatives - youtu.be/iEc8nZkn258
Other of our syntax videos:
Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU
Referential Treatment: Binding Theory - youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA
Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement and Traces - youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace
And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-71
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
You can find a good discussion of this topic in Andrew Carnie's Syntax: A Generative Introduction (3rd edition).
The specific examples from Irish are taken from Carnie's dissertation, which you can find here: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~carnie/publications/Thesishome.html
The Malagasy data is from Ileana Paul's thesis (cited to work by Ed Keenan, 1976, "Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy"). You can find her thesis here: http://publish.uwo.ca/~ileana/papers/dissertation.pdf
Looking forward to next week!
