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Proximal to distal: Information flow and order in Maa

  • Doris L. Payne
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Word Order Variation
This chapter is in the book Word Order Variation

Abstract

A long-standing issue in discourse-pragmatics is the differing conceptual content linguists have for information-structural terms related to “topic” and “focus”. This paper aims to clarify some concepts relevant to this domain, including (basically) deixis terms like “proximal” (or “proximate”) and “distal”, which may be relevant to the linear placement of what this volume calls Target phrases (approximately, RECIPIENT, GOAL, BENEFACTIVE arguments). The paper shows how selected notions of topic might be operationalized to investigate relative order of object phrases encoding these and INSTRUMENT phrases in Maa (Eastern Nilotic) ditransitive clauses. On the basis of a corpus study, I suggest that relative to postverbal phrases, Maa has a general constructional pattern of ordering cognitively proximal information before cognitively distal information.

Abstract

A long-standing issue in discourse-pragmatics is the differing conceptual content linguists have for information-structural terms related to “topic” and “focus”. This paper aims to clarify some concepts relevant to this domain, including (basically) deixis terms like “proximal” (or “proximate”) and “distal”, which may be relevant to the linear placement of what this volume calls Target phrases (approximately, RECIPIENT, GOAL, BENEFACTIVE arguments). The paper shows how selected notions of topic might be operationalized to investigate relative order of object phrases encoding these and INSTRUMENT phrases in Maa (Eastern Nilotic) ditransitive clauses. On the basis of a corpus study, I suggest that relative to postverbal phrases, Maa has a general constructional pattern of ordering cognitively proximal information before cognitively distal information.

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Preface V
  3. Contents VII
  4. Factors influencing word ordering 1
  5. Proximal to distal: Information flow and order in Maa 15
  6. Word order variation in Middle Iranic: Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, and Sogdian 39
  7. Word order in Mukri Kurdish – the case of incorporated Targets 63
  8. Targets and other postverbal arguments in Southern Balochi: A multidimensional cline 89
  9. Word order in contact and the expression of Target in Northern Domari 127
  10. The evolution of VO and OV alternation in Romeyka 141
  11. Word order in Iran-Turkic 163
  12. Word order variation in Chulym Turkic of Siberia 181
  13. Copulas and Target phrase positioning in the Arabic dialects of Kurdistan 197
  14. Word order typology in North-Eastern Neo- Aramaic 235
  15. Index of Authors 259
  16. Index of Languages 262
  17. Index of Subjects 264
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110790368-002

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Preface V
  3. Contents VII
  4. Factors influencing word ordering 1
  5. Proximal to distal: Information flow and order in Maa 15
  6. Word order variation in Middle Iranic: Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, and Sogdian 39
  7. Word order in Mukri Kurdish – the case of incorporated Targets 63
  8. Targets and other postverbal arguments in Southern Balochi: A multidimensional cline 89
  9. Word order in contact and the expression of Target in Northern Domari 127
  10. The evolution of VO and OV alternation in Romeyka 141
  11. Word order in Iran-Turkic 163
  12. Word order variation in Chulym Turkic of Siberia 181
  13. Copulas and Target phrase positioning in the Arabic dialects of Kurdistan 197
  14. Word order typology in North-Eastern Neo- Aramaic 235
  15. Index of Authors 259
  16. Index of Languages 262
  17. Index of Subjects 264
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