Tlingit: An Object-Initial Language?
A number of early grammatical descriptions of Tlingit, a non-Athapaskan Na-Dene language spoken in southeast Alaska and in adjacent areas of Canada, describe the language as being OSV. Evidence is presented in this paper that Tlingit is not OSV. Until recent years, it was thought that of the six log...
| Published in: | Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique |
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge University Press (CUP)
1985
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100010653 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0008413100010653 |
| Summary: | A number of early grammatical descriptions of Tlingit, a non-Athapaskan Na-Dene language spoken in southeast Alaska and in adjacent areas of Canada, describe the language as being OSV. Evidence is presented in this paper that Tlingit is not OSV. Until recent years, it was thought that of the six logically possible word orders of subject, verb, and object, only SOV, SVO, VSO, and VOS existed. (See for example Pullum 1977). Since then, however, evidence for the existence of object-initial languages has been presented by Derbyshire (1977) and Derbyshire and Pullum (1981). Almost all of the object-initial languages discussed by Derbyshire and Pullum are spoken in or near the Amazon basin in South America. There is to date no clear case of an object-initial language spoken outside of South America. |
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