Left -right asymmetries of word order variation: A functional explanation.

摘要

This work was initially inspired by the close parallelism clauses and NPs with respect to left-right asymmetries in word order variation. Particularly, while basic orders within NPs and clauses in head-final structures are relatively consistent, those in head-initial structures are quite diverse, as illustrated below: (1) (a) Orders of S, O, V in clauses: If V-final, the basic order is almost always SOV. If V-initial, both VOS and VOS are likely to be basic orders. (b) Orders of D(emonstrative), A(djective) and N in NPs: If N-final, the basic order is always DAN. If N-initial, both NDA and NAD are likely to be basic orders.;Related to this asymmetry is the following parallelism. (2) When the two dependents are separated by the bead. (a) The clause basic order is overwhelming SVO. (b) The NP basic order is always DNA. This study tries to unify for the parallelism, based on the interaction between the semantic and pragmatic ordering rules: When the effects of the two are mutually consistent, the relevant orders are quite stable; when the effects conflict, the resulting orders are diverse.;It is widely acknowledged that units of high referentiality tend to precede units of low referentiality within clauses. This study witnesses a similar tendency that modifiers contributing more referentiality to their mother NP tend to precede modifiers contributing less, an extension of referentiality effects.;Since the relation between referential contribution and positioning is initiated from a detailed analysis of Chinese NP-internal ordering in this work, it has two major contribution: providing an analysis of Chinese NPs and comparing different NPs cross-linguistically.;Though the explanatory part of the work is functional, its argumentation attempts to follow the spirit of formalism, i.e. to start with a minimal set of simplex concepts and then proceed unidirectionally. More precisely, we take the semantically optimal order as the point of departure in our analysis and then investigate the effect of the pragmatics, specifically referentiality, on word order variation. Thus, the current work can also be seen as an attempt to combine functional and formal approaches to syntax.