Table Of ContentWORD ORDER IN DISCOURSE
TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE (TSL)
A companion series to the journal "STUDIES IN LANGUAGE"
Honorary Editor: Joseph H. Greenberg
General Editor: T. Givón
Associate General Editor: Michael Noonan
Assistant Editors: Spike Gildea, Suzanne Kemmer
Editorial Board:
Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Ronald Langacker (San Diego)
Bernard Comrie (Los Angeles) Charles Li (Santa Barbara)
R.M.W. Dixon (Canberra) Andrew Pawley (Canberra)
Matthew Dryer (Buffalo) Doris Payne (Oregon)
John Haiman (St Paul) Frans Plank (Konstanz)
Kenneth Hale (Cambridge, Mass.) Jerrold Sadock (Chicago)
Bernd Heine (Köln) Dan Slobin (Berkeley)
Paul Hopper (Pittsburgh) Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara)
Andrej Kibrik (Moscow)
Volumes in this series will be functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific
topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language
typologies. The orientation of the volumes will be substantive rather than formal, with the
aim of investigating universals of human language via as broadly defined a data base as
possible, leaning toward cross-linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse data.
The series is, in spirit as well as in fact, a continuation of the tradition initiated by C. Li (Word
Order and Word Order Change, Subject and Topic, Mechanisms for Syntactic Change) and
continued by T. Givón (Discourse and Syntax) and P. Hopper (Tense-Aspect: Between
Semantics and Pragmatics).
Volume 30
Pamela Downing and Michael Noonan (eds)
Word Order in Discourse
WORD ORDER
IN DISCOURSE
Edited by
PAMELA DOWNING
MICHAEL NOONAN
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Word order in discourse / edited by Pamela Downing, Michael Noonan.
p. cm. -- (Typological studies in language, ISSN 0167-7373; v. 30)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Word order. 2. Typology (Linguistics) 3. Dis
course analysis. I. Downing, Pamela. II. Noonan, Michael (Michael P.) III. Series.
P295.W66 1995
415~dc20 94-44088
ISBN 90 272 2921 X (hb.) / 90 272 2922 8 (pb.) (European; alk. paper) CIP
ISBN 1-55619-424-2 (hb.) / 1-55619-636-9 (pb.) (U.S.; alk. paper)
© Copyright 1995 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
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John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA
Preface
The present volume constitutes a selection from the more than fifty papers
presented at a symposium entitled Word Order in Discourse held at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, April 12-14, 1991. The symposium was
the twentieth in a series of linguistics symposia held at UWM and was chaired
by Edith Moravcsik and me.
The topic of this symposium grew out of an idea I had for a conference on
verb-initial languages and the ways in which these languages exploit word
order variation in discourse. Somewhere along the way, the scope of the
symposium broadened to include word order variation in discourse in all
languages. The topic proved to be a popular one, since the fifty or so papers
presented at the symposium were selected from among the more than one
hundred twenty abstracts we received after the symposium was announced.
The UWM Linguistics Symposia are community endeavors and would
not be possible without the untiring assistance of dozens of people. I would
like to take this opportunity to thank the following who, together with Edith
and me, served on the organizing committee: Michael Darnell, Fred Eckman,
Gregory Iverson, and Patricia Kilroe. The following campus units offered
financial support: the Center for Twentieth Century Studies, the College of
Letters and Science, the Department of English and Comparative Literature,
the Department of German, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of
Philosophy, the Department of Slavic Languages, the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese, the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, the
Division of Outreach and Continuing Education, the Graduate School, the
Intensive English as a Second Language Program, the Language Resource
Center, the Master of Arts in Foreign Language and Literature Program, the
School of Allied Health Professions, and the School of Education. To all these
units, I would like to express my sincere appreciation for their support, which,
for many of these units, has continued over many years.
Michael Noonan
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Word order in discourse: By way of introduction 1
Pamela Downing
What are discourse principles made of? 29
Ron Cowan
Agent position in the Sejarah Melayu 51
Susanna Cumming
Preverbal nominals in Colville-Okanagan 85
Michael Darnell
Frequency and pragmatically unmarked word order 105
Matthew S. Dryer
Subject-verb word order and the function of early position 137
Bruce B. Harold
Focus position in SOV languages 163
Susan C. Herring and John C. Paolillo
Word order at the noun phrase level in Japanese: quantifier
constructions and discourse functions 199
Alan Hyun-Oak Kim
WH-clefts and left-dislocation in English conversation:
cases of topicalization 247
Kyu-hyun Kim
Pragmatic relations and word order in Chinese 297
Randy J. LaPolla
Left shifts in strongly VSO languages 331
Robert E. Longacre
viii Contents
The pragmatics of verb initial sentences in some ancient
Indo-European languages 355
Silvia Luraghi
Morphological and prosodic forces shaping word order 387
Marianne Mithun
The word order of two-constituent constructions in spoken Spanish 425
Francisco Ocampo
Verb initial languages and information order 449
Doris L. Payne
On the discourse function of possessor movement in Emai prose
narratives 487
Ronald P. Schaefer
Focal attention, voice, and word order: an experimental,
cross-linguistic study 517
Russell S. Tomlin
Noun incorporation and object placement in discourse:
the case of Guaraní 555
Maura Velázquez-Castillo
Subject index 581
Author index 591
List of Abbreviations
ABL ablative LOC locative
ACC accusative MASC masculine
ACT active
NEG negative
ADJ adjective
NOM nominative
ADV adverb
OBJ object
ART article
OBL oblique
ASP aspect
ATT attributive PART particle
AUX auxiliary PASS passive
PAST past
CAUS causative
PERF perfect
CL clitic
PL plural
CLASS classifier
POSS possessive
COMP complementizer
PRED predicate
COND conditional
PRES present
CONT continuative
PRET preterite
COP copula
PROG progressive
DAT dative
Q question
EMP emphatic
QUOT quotative
FEM feminine
RED reduplicative
FOC focus
REL relative
FUT future
SG singular
GEN genitive
STAT stative
HON honorific SUBJ subject
IMP imperative TAG tag question
IMPERF imperfect TAM tense-aspect modality
INDEF indefinitive TOP topic
INF infinitive TRANS transitive
INSTR instrumental
VOC vocative
INT intransitive
