Workshop for PhD students and young researchers

Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax
Leikanger, 25 August 2005

Extending Hawkins' comparative typology:
from German and English to the Germanic languages


Gunther De Vogelaer, University of Gent

In a well-known book, Hawkins (1986), expanding on an original idea by Sapir (1921), attributes a number of typological differences between German and English to the way in which both languages distinguish grammatical roles. Whereas German uses morphological means (i.e. case) to do so, English makes use of a rather ‘tight’ syntax (strict SVO-word order). Dutch, however, seems to provide a counterexample: on the one hand, Dutch nouns, like English nouns, no longer show case distinctions. On the other hand, Dutch, like German, can use word order extensively for pragmatic purposes.

In my talk, I will propose an extra parameter for Hawkins’ comparative typology, viz. verb agreement, which can be considered as a so-called ‘functional equivalent’ (Keenan 1978) of both case and strict word order (cf. Siewierska & Bakker 1996:138-139). Using verb agreement as an extra parameter, Dutch can be integrated in Hawkins’ typology. In addition, data from Scandinavian languages indicate that Hawkins’ notion of ‘grammatical word order’ can be replaced by a more precise word order feature, viz. the possibility to place verbs in between subjects and objects in all sentence types.

References
Hawkins, John A. (1986). A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. London & Sydney: Croom Helm.
Keenan, Edward L. (1978). Language Variation and the Logical Structure of Universal Grammar. In: Seiler, Hansjakob (ed.). Language Universals. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. p.89-124.
Sapir, Edward (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Siewierska, Anna & Dik Bakker (1996). The Distribution of Subject and Object Agreement and Word Order Type. In: Studies in Language 20 (1), 115-161.