The driving forces for word order: Results from Baskhardi and Balochi
Résumé
In this talk, I will present some statistics on word order in Bashkardi, a group of dialects spoken inland of the Strait of Hormoz, and compare them with findings about word order in Balochi.
Both languages predominantly show subject-object-verb (SOV) sentence structure, which has often been seen as implying that clauses are verb-final as a rule. However, the Bashkardi data used for this study, which are my analyses of recordings that Ilya Gershevitch collected in Iran in 1956, show roughly one third (30.0%) of all non-subject elements after the verb.
Semantic role plays an important role. For instance, Goals of verbs of motion or caused motion are mostly placed after the verb in Bashkardi (71.5%, thus the reverse of the overall distribution), and this tendency increases markedly with Goal consisting of more one word.
Goals thus differ from other elements such as direct objects in several respects. Nominal direct objects are preverbal in 77.8% of all cases, and the overall variation of their placement depending on weight is lower than that of Goals. Crucially, their being longer than one word does not produce a statistically significant increase of postverbal instances.
The overall tendencies seen in Bashkardi largely agree with those of a study on word order in Southern Balochi. They also highlight an important influence of information structure that is liable to override other principles of pre- and postverbal placement, while there are also some interesting differences.