Volume 58, Issue 4 - 4

The ensuing paper is about the promiscuity of active and passive forms and their functions in Early Romance. Specifically, ever since the synthetic simple passive was gradually abandoned since Late Latin, new composite forms emerged involving several full verbs, among which fakere . The unusual novel use of facere +P(ast)P(articiple) in passive function in Old Sardinian (Logudorese) first signalled by MEYER-LÜBKE (1902) was hypothesized to reflect the early equivalence facere / fieri ‘make, do/be done’ in Late Latin, whereby feci ‘made, did’ equalled factus sum ‘made/done was’. It is argued that indeed the grammaticalization of facere as a passive auxiliary might be related to the equivalence between the transitive verb facere and its pro-passive fieri . Other than argued by CENNAMO and MEYER-LÜBKE it is held that this type of promiscuity can only be understood if one places it within the wider phenomenon of promiscuous verbal argument linking (a reflex of which is the equivalence facere/fieri). What is more, it is argued that this blurred pre-merge lexical syntax is the precedent stage for the rise of SVO and the novel equivalence of S=Top – an emergence against the prior Topic prominent stage of (Late) Latin.

This paper presents experimental data on postverbal argument order in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a verb initial language which according to previous analyses displays verb-agent-patient as its canonical order. The data presented in this paper were obtained in an experiment on interpreting ambiguous sentences. The experiment evaluated hypotheses about the impact of animacy, definiteness, verbal aspect and pragmatic preferences on Yucatec Mayan postverbal orders. The participants of the experiment showed considerable instability in role choice for postverbal arguments, sometimes preferring the agent-patient and sometimes the patient-agent order. The role choice is predominantly determined by pragmatic inferences which are supported by inherent properties of the postverbal NPs like animacy and definiteness.

This paper surveys the history of areal distribution of word order based on data from some 3,000 languages. When the current areal distribution of word order is viewed synchronically, only two or three word order types, namely, consistent VO and (sub)consistent OV types occupy almost equally vast areas on the globe. When the distribution is considered from a historical point of view, however, it is very likely that most of the areas had been covered with (S)OV-type languages and that the areas of a VO type had been very restricted before many large language families expanded after the Neolithic age.