[williamdix]

So here is the issue that the actual article discusses. In generating sentences, you have grammars with rewrite rules like

  PP(Prepositional Phrase) := P(Preposition)NP(Noun Phrase).

In such a rule, the preposition is the head. There is an assertion that languages have the property head-first or complement-first. In this case, the complement-first rule would instead be

  PP := NP(Noun Phrase) P(Preposition)

So in head-first languages, we would see:

  PP := P NP
  The man is PP(in the house)
  VP := V NP
  I VP(ate the bird)

And in complement-first languages, we would see:

  PP := NP P
  The man is PP(the house in)
  VP := NP V
  I VP(the bird ate)

The article states that if head-first and complement-first were robust, universal features of languages, then we would expect the evolutionary model to show that the appearances of word orders demonstrating these features are dependent on each other across language families. However, it does not show this across the language families. It only shows that certain word orders created by head-firstness or complement-firstness are dependent in certain language families.

I hope this was a decent enough explanation and easy for others to follow. I was a Linguistics major, so it can be hard for me to explain it well and in an easy to understand way.

[edited in an attempt at formatting] [edited to provide more examples]

[T-R]

I'm admittedly having a bit of trouble parsing the first sentence of your last paragraph.

When you say "if head-first and complement-first were robust, universal features of languages", do you mean "head-first and complement-first cover the whole set of possibilities for the property 'word order'", or "all languages (within a family?) are one or the other", or something more like "a given language cannot contain both head-first and complement-first structures", or something different?

Also, with "appearances of word orders demonstrating these features are dependent on each other across language families", in what sense do you mean that the appearances would be dependent on each other?

[williamdix]

I mean something along the lines of if head-first and complement-first are the only possibilites for phrase rules and that they must apply to all phrase rules for a given language, i.e.

  for all X, s.t. X is a grammatic category which can be the head of a phrase ; XP := X _

or

  for all X ; s.t. X is a grammatic category which can be the head of a phrase; XP := _ X 

Then, modulo processes which change a sentence from its underlying form to its surface form, we would only see forms characteristic of head-first or complement-first phrase structure.

In the second case, I intend dependent as the article means dependent. That is co-appearing because of the same underlying feature. To use the genetic analogy, co-appearing because one gene (the head firstness gene) determines them.

[T-R]

Thanks kindly, much appreciated.

[T-R]

For anyone having trouble following, the article author's webpage provides a nice introduction:

http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/wordorder/

[neilk]

Thanks for this!

However, I'm not seeing how this strikes at Chomsky's theory. It does give us some insight into mental machinery, that languages aren't necessarily parsimonious in reusing the same structures across NPs and VPs. But what's the significance?

[williamdix]

The Ars article way over-states the significance. It should really say something like "Chomsky was wrong, languages are not only head-first or complement-first, and they only appear that way because of cultural inheritance, not universal rules" But that's not very exciting, is it?