This feature focuses on the relative order of subject and verb in intransitive clauses. All questions concerning order of constituents aim to capture the pragmatically unmarked order between full NP constituents (not pronouns). Do not consider ‘left or right-dislocation’, accompanied by intonational signals, or pragmatically marked constructions such as focus. If the verb phrase consists of several elements it is the lexical verb that counts. The position of auxiliaries/TAME marking elements can be ignored.
Makhuwa (ISO 639-3: vmw, Glottolog: makh1264)
Available examples of intransitive clauses with full NP subjects in Makhuwa show SV order, as in the example below.
mwanámwáné o-ná-mwéétta CL1.child CL1-PRS.DJ-walk ‘the child walks’ (van der Wal 2009: 70)
Makhuwa is coded 1.
Longgu (ISO 639-3: lgu, Glottolog: long1395)
The basic word order of Longgu is described as V(O)S, though the grammatical description also describes pragmatically marked constructions where a nominal subject is fronted to indicate a new topic or for contrastive focus (Hill 2002: 554). Pragmatically unmarked transitive clauses therefore have VS order, as in the example below, which is analyzed by the grammar writer as syntactically intransitive (Hill 1992: 19).
ara vai-hu-vi ngaia vanoa-na komu-i-na 3PL RECP-shout-TR 3SG people-3SG village-SG-DEI ‘the people of the village shouted to each other’ (Hill 2002: 554) (Abbreviations: DEI = ‘deictic’, TR = ‘transitive suffix’)
Longgu is coded 2.
Seneca (ISO 639-3: see, Glottolog: sene1264)
Chafe (2015: 147) describes Seneca as having relatively free word order. Full NP subjects can precede or follow the verb, as in the examples below.
hö:gak shadíäta’ hö:gak s-hati-hrat-ha’ geese REP-M.PL.A-go.by-HAB ‘geese go by again’ (Chafe 2015: 183) de’ónesdo:h neh lake ahsöh te’-yo-nehtso-:h neh laje ahsöh NEG-NEUT.SG.P-be.frozen-STAT namely lake still ‘the lake isn't still frozen’ (Chafe 2015: 174)
Seneca is coded 3.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2007. Word order. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Clause structure, language typology and syntactic description, Vol. 1 (Second edition), 61–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Order of subject and verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Song, Jae Jung. 2011. Word order typology. The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology, 253–279. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chafe, Wallace. 2015. A grammar of the Seneca Language. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 150.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hill, Deborah. 1992. Longgu grammar. Canberra: Australian National University. (Doctoral dissertation.)
Hill, Deborah. 2002. Longgu. In Lynch, John and Ross, Malcolm and Crowley, Terry (eds), The Oceanic Languages, 538–561. Richmond: Curzon.
van der Wal, Johanna. 2009. Word order and information structure in Makhuwa-Enahara. Leiden: Leiden University. (Doctoral dissertation.)
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| 1 | SV | 1827 | |
| 2 | VS | 346 | |
| 3 | both | 147 | |
| ? | Not known | 95 |
| Name | Glottocode | Family | Macroarea | Contributor | Value | Source | Comment |
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