It ain't necessarily S(V)O: Two kinds of VSO languages

George Aaron Broadwell

Abstract

Proceedings of LFG05; CSLI Publications On-line

Some VSO languages, such as Welsh, show evidence for a VP constituent, with VSO order obtained by positioning the verb in a higher functional projection outside S. However, in other VSO languages, such as Zapotec, constituency tests show no evidence for a VP, and indeed seem to provide evidence against such a constituent. Lexical-Functional Grammar allows us to give different syntactic analyses of the these two types of VSO languages that captures their fundamental diversity.