Word order in ancient Greek: VSO, SVO, SOV, or all of the above?

Post-Homeric Greek is a language which has a high degree of freedom in the placement of words/phrases within the sentence, so much so that there have been competing claims regarding the so-called 'basic' or 'unmarked' order of constituents. VSO, SVO, and SOV have all been claimed to be the 'basic' word order by various scholars, whose claims are usually made either on the basis of statistical studies or on the basis of language typology. The statistical studies are faulty for the following reasons: (1) the statistical method most commonly employed (frequency counts) is improper and fails to control for relevant variables; (2) the selected data base is often too narrow and not representative of the Greek language as a whole; (3) the results are contradictory. Different researchers, even working with the same text, often have mutually exclusive results. The studies of Greek syntax which are based on language typology theory are likewise faulty because it can be demonstrated that Greek exhibits syntactic behaviour which contradicts the predicted syntactic behaviour of any given type of language. Furthermore, many of the typology studies are based on an understanding of typological theory which is excessively restrictive.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Cervin, Richard Stuart

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hock, Hans Henrich

• Language, Ancient
• Language, Linguistics
• Literature, Classical

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1990 Cervin, Richard Stuart

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

AAI9114192
(UMI)AAI9114192

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/21810