The papers in this section deal—inter alia—with Dravidian word order. The clausal order is traditionally described as V-final but with “free” order of the phrases in the pre-verbal space. The free order is traditionally generated by a rule of ‘scrambling’ in generative treatments of Dravidian. But the proposal here is that the free order is capable of a more insightful explanation. First of all, we need to understand the puzzle of rightward and leftward scrambling in the pre-verbal space. Rightward scrambling is to a position immediately to the left of V, and it gives rise to focusing effects. This is the position of wh-phrases in Malayalam. Leftward scrambling has topicalizing effects. The interesting thing is that parallel scrambling patterns have been noted in the OV languages of Europe. Our proposal—which is in terms of clausal architecture, i.e. the universal functional sequence (‘fseq’) of the clause—is that there are IP-internal topic and focus phrases. This proposal explains scrambling patterns in Malayalam, German, Dutch and Yiddish. See Chapters 1, 2, and 3.
Chapter 4 puts forward a general theory about head-initial and head-final word orders in the world’s languages.
The literature on this general area is too vast for us to survey here. But the reader can pursue the references in these papers for some guidance. The introductory essay of Sabel & Saito (2005) gives a good conspectus of the issues relating to the topic of scrambling. Very briefly, two broad types of scrambling have been postulated, namely the Japanese type which apparently has no semantic consequences, and the type illustrated by the OV languages of Europe (e.g. German and Dutch) which clearly has topicalizing or focusing effects. The claim of our papers here is that Dravidian scrambling belongs to the second type. But this was not the position of early generative work on Dravidian scrambling: see (e.g.) Mohanan (1982) which makes the extreme claim that except for verb finality, the Malayalam sentence has no neutral phrasal order. (This claim was made in the context of the early GB idea that there is a fundamental divide between ‘configurational’ and ‘non-configurational’ languages—only the former have VP in their clause structure, while the latter have a “flat” clause structure. The reader may see Speas (1990) for a critical discussion of this question.)
Regarding Chapter 4, which is about head-initial and head-final word orders, a good point of entry to the issues here might perhaps be the papers in Svenonius (2000).
[The discussion of word order in these papers makes reference to the theory of ‘antisymmetry’ (Kayne 1994). A reader unfamiliar with this theory can find an outline of it in Hornstein, Nunes & Grohmann (2005), Chapter 7.]
Hornstein, N., J. Nunes & K. Grohmann. 2005. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kayne, R. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Mohanan, K. P. 1982. Grammatical relations and clause structure in Malayalam. In J. Bresnan, ed. The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, 504–589. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Sabel, J. & M. Saito (eds.). 2005. The Free Word Order Phenomenon: Its Syntactic Sources and Diversity. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Speas, M. 1990. Phrase Structure in Natural Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Svenonius, P. (ed.) 2000. The derivation of VO and OV. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.