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The Pear-Chaplin Basque Corpus
© Jon Aske
Basque has been classified as a subject-object-verb language, with great freedom to rearrange its ‘basic’ order according to ‘stylistic’ considerations. I argue that Basque word order¾ and that of most other languages¾ should not be classified in terms of grammatical relations but, rather, in terms of the pragmatic relations topic and focus. Explaining constituent order, in this view, consists of ascertaining the conditions under which different elements of the clause are chosen to fill these roles and the different ways in which these roles are formally realized, and under which conditions, in different types of asserted clauses. A major coding device for these pragmatic relations is word order.
Basque, like all so-called object-verb (OV) languages, makes use primarily of preverbal position for focus elements, whereas so-called verb-object (VO) languages use postverbal position as their primary focus position, in addition to preverbal position for very salient foci. In addition, Basque, like all VO and most OV languages, makes use of an extraposed ‘position’, namely a position at the end of the clause or after the clause proper, intonationally clefted from the rest of the clause. The increasingly liberal use made of this latter focusing option by many speakers suggests that perhaps it is becoming relatively unmarked. I believe that this may be leading to a reanalysis of the extraposed position as postverbal for some speakers. This might explain the historical change from OV to VO as consisting of the acquisition of a new focus position, with the concomitant specialization of the positions. The opposite change from VO to OV order, on the other hand, would involve the loss of the postverbal focus position, a change which is quite rare in language.
If Basque is changing, as the amount of variation in focusing strategies found among speakers uncovered in this study suggests, it may be that intense contact with VO Romance languages is involved in this change. The change does not involve mere borrowing of foreign patterns, such as the borrowing of a postverbal focus position, but rather seems to proceed through ‘convergence’ of already existing constructions with those of the source language and reanalysis of the reinterpreted native constructions.
Basque has been classified as a verb-final language. It is also said to be a language with very flexible or ‘free’ constituent order. In other words, constituent order is said to freely change according to so-called ‘stylistic’ considerations. In this dissertation I have set out to exemplify, quantify, and begin to understand the logic behind this freedom in the ordering of constituents in Basque asserted clauses. In addition, I have attempted to come to grips with the variation that one finds, for instance, among individual speakers and among different discourse genres. I have also attempted to ascertain certain possible ongoing trends towards change which may be connected to that variation.
Basque is the only so-called verb-final (SOV) language in Western Europe, and it has remained verb-final despite the fact that it has been surrounded and influenced in other ways by neighboring so-called verb-medial (SVO) languages, even though word order is a feature said to spread readily. The language contact situation is particularly interesting because at present all the remaining Basque speakers are bilingual in their language and a neighboring Romance language and they are surrounded by monolingual Romance speakers. Other word order characteristics of Basque include: postpositions, genitive-noun and noun-adjective orders, prenominal relative clauses, preverbal focus, and mostly postverbal subordinators, which are (typically) clause-final in non-finite clauses and in some finite subordinate clauses (such as conditional clauses, though not in asserted complement clauses). Most of these are characteristics which are said to correlated with SOV order.
As far as we know, this flexibility has been a characteristic of the Basque word order for a long time. However, there are indications that modern day spoken Basque may be being influenced by the surrounding languages in its word order characteristics. This study attempts to ascertain whether this is indeed the case and, if so, the nature of that influence.
This study deals with different varieties of Basque, including standard written Basque and, most importantly, Basque as it is actually spoken by different speakers. Standard Basque is a creation of the last thirty years and in the area of word order it follows certain idealized principles of constituent ordering which are not always adhered to faithfully in practice. The ways in which these rules or broken or, rather, bent, provides an interesting glimpse into the nature of Basque constituent order, the differences among varieties of Basque, and the possible directions of change.
A review of the literature on the subject of word order and its application to the Basque data reveals that the main explanatory principles or parameters have already been identified at one time or another to describe Basque and other languages. These are principles of pragmatic information structure, such as the pragmatic roles topic and focus, and not grammatical principles or categories as it is often assumed. These principles are common to all human languages. Different languages apply them somewhat differently in their grammaticalized constructions for a variety of reasons which I explore in this dissertation. In addition to attempting to ascertain the universal explanatory principles of word order, I try to deal with the parameters of variation which account for the differences found among languages, and within any one language.
In the course of this investigation I have found that previous analysts of Basque word order have often made extremely insightful observations. Still, much work remains to be done, especially in the area of describing the variation found in Basque word order, according to dialectal and contextual differences, such as genre, and according to characteristics of the speakers, such as age, degree of bilingualism, and so on. The present study attempts to add to the growing literature on this subject and to encourage others to follow it with more detailed studies along the lines presented here.
This study concentrates on actual spoken and written Basque as exemplified in a corpus which will be presented in Chapter 2. Until now, most studies have used primarily intuition and introspection to uncover the principles which determine or influence constituent order, a fact which may have limited the types of generalizations which have been reached and which may have masked much of the variation that is found. This is because some of the factors which affect constituent order are not readily amenable to introspection and a detailed analysis of actual texts provides valuable additional data to consider.
This dissertation is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 lays down many of the theoretical assumptions which guide this study, which are in great part common to the functionalist and typological perspective(s) in linguistics. It was felt that presenting the detailed background for this study was important, given the lack of a homogenous theoretical approach in the field of linguistics, even among those who share a similar general orientation. In this chapter I also discuss some notions from the study of language contact and language change, especially as they pertain to grammatical and word order change.
Chapter 2 serves two main purposes. The first is to familiarize the reader with typological facts about Basque. The second is to introduce the corpus used for this study and to present some of the most obvious preliminary generalizations which can be made from it.
Chapter 3 is the major theoretical chapter and in it I discuss the basic notions of discourse pragmatics and information structure, and the ways in which they to a large extent determine the order of constituents in asserted clauses and sentences in different languages, as well as how they interact with other principles of word order, such as grammatical ones.
The remaining chapters, chapters 4-7, deal with different aspects of the general theory presented in Chapter 3 and with the variation that is found in Basque in these different areas. Chapter 4 deals primarily with the pragmatic notion of topicality and the pragmatic role topic, and the formal realization of topics in Basque. Chapter 5 concentrates on sentences which do not have topics, or which have ‘unusual’ topics, either non-subject topics or postverbal topics (antitopics). Chapter 6 is about the pragmatic notion of focality, which is closely related to the notion of topicality, and with the pragmatic role focus, as well as the formal characteristics of focus constituents in Basque. Finally, Chapter 7 deals in greater depth with assertions other than average affirmative declarative assertions, such as negative assertions, emphatic assertions, and imperatives.
Like other investigators before me, I have detected a trend towards greater use of postverbal complements in Basque. Through the use of actual spoken data from a variety of speakers, as well as from written sources, I have attempted to understand the actual parameters of variation and to uncover the mechanisms by which such variation comes about and to ascertain the reasons, or at least some correlations, for the variation. Much of this variation seems to be due to the different use that different speakers make of existing constructions and focusing strategies in the language and not directly to borrowing of foreign structures. This is in line with current theories of language change and language contact.
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