Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!gatech!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsb!reddy
From: reddy@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <165000005@uiucdcsb>
Date: 20 Jan 88 08:36:00 GMT
References: <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Lines: 58
Nf-ID: #R:russell.STANFORD.EDU:1671:uiucdcsb:165000005:000:2452
Nf-From: uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu!reddy    Jan 20 02:36:00 1988


/* Written 11:16 am  Jan 17, 1988 by nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU in uiucdcsb:comp.ai */

In the area of AI, I believe you should first attack the center of the
problems and leave the details or exceptions out.  The problem you are
attacking is too complicated to worry about the boundary conditions.

Words ordering in a syntax is not chosen at random.  There must be
some explanation to it.  If you know a better one, please let me know.

/* End of text from uiucdcsb:comp.ai */

In making theories of languages, we have to first remember that
languages EVOLVED.  Evolution is necessarily nondeterministic, and
several choices are possible at each stage.  Once a choice is made by
a line of culture, other things just have to get tagged on.  The prior
choices cannot be retracted.  It may eventually appear that the final
outcome is complex, wrong or unnatural from some perspective, but that
has to be understood in the context of the history of the language.

I am no linguist, but I can certainly imagine the following line of
evolution:

1. Langage V: only verbs.  (Come, go, give, went, ate).

2. Language SV: subject + verb.  (I went.  You hunt.  She ate).

   At this stage there are two choices for word order.  S-V or V-S.
   All the languages I know have S-V.  Anybody know the other one?

3. Language VO: verb + object (Come here.  Ate ham).

   Even for this, there are two choices for word orders.  V-O or O-V.
   Both SV and VO are equally plausible after V.  Different cultures
   may have developed them in different order.  Or, it is also possible
   for a language to have had separate SV and VO components at the
   same time.

3. Language SVO: subject + verb + object  (I kill it.  She ate ham).

   Given the word order of SV and VO there are at most two ways to
   combine them.
	S-V + V-O = S-V-O
	V-S + V-O = V-S-O or V-O-S
	S-V + O-V = S-O-V or O-S-V
	V-S + O-V = O-V-S
   It sounds somewhat ridiculous to put object at the front, but there
   may indeed be languages that do so.  

What this shows is that languages could have evolved purely by
ARBITRARY choices at each stage of evolution, without any REASONS for
those choices.  Some choices may indeed have reasons.  For example,
there are strong reasons to favor S-V order over V-S order in the
language SV.  Most languages, in fact, show this.  But, between
the order O-V and V-O, there seems to be no preferred one.  So, we
find wide variation in this.  

Uday Reddy