Chapter 8

Syntactic Structure & Typology

In the previous chapter i talked about the sort of things that syntactic research is about, the kind
of questions about language use and linguistic behaviour that syntacticians are interested in, and
the kind of data that they consider relevant to their work. Now it's time to show you a little bit
of how syntacticians analyze the sentences of human language.
1
Phrase-Structure Trees
You may or may not be aware of it, but when we hear a sentence (assuming it's in a language we
understand) we not only recognize the individual words but have a habit of grouping them into
larger constituents, into phrases. And the same thing happens when we compose a sentence to
say or write. I'm going to try to demonstrate this process using the following sentence:
The girl with the blue barrette is speaking to that quiet boy.
OK, the way i've got it here, it's just a sequence of twelve words; there's no obvious internal or-
ganization, at least not visually; not even any punctuation. But any fluent speaker of English
will immediately conclude that the words the and girl go together; likewise the words that,
quiet, and boy; likewise the words the, blue, and barrette. There are two ways this kind
of association is usually represented, and i'm going to show you both. We can put square brack-
ets around each of these groups of words, or we can draw lines to connect them like this:
[The girl] with [the blue barrette] is speaking to [that quiet boy]
Alright, now let's look at this word to; what do you think it goes with? Fine, let's call that a
larger constituent and mark it accordingly. And we can do the same with the word with and
the phrase the blue barrette, right? And what about these two phrases, the girl and with the
blue barrette? Should they go together? Right, OK, let's put them together like this:

[[The girl] [with [the blue barrette]]] is speaking [to [that quiet boy]]

1
The presentation i'm about to give you is based on what is often called the Standard Theory of syntax, which was
developed back in the 1960's, mostly by the famous linguist Noam Chomsky at MIT and his students. Much of this
theoretical background is assumed to some extent or another by almost all syntacticians today, even when all they
do with it is explain why they disagree with it, and this is the reason why in my senior class on syntactic theory i
spent the first half of the first semester explaining it in detail to my students. I'm telling you this so you'll know that
most the details in this presentation you cannot assume to be correct beyond a shadow of a doubt. I told you earlier
that there's some controversy among phonologists about the details of distinctive features, although nobody doubts
the basic idea. Well, we're talking about syntax now, and that's one of my own fields of specialization, and i can tell
you that there's a lot of controversy in that area. But every syntactician knows the stuff in this presentation, even
though hann may not agree with it in every detail. Almost all modern syntactic research in some sense or another
starts from the assumptions of the Standard Theory, and that's why it's important to understand this stuff.
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Beyond that it gets a little controversial. Most would probably agree that the verb speaking
should be grouped with to that quiet boy; some would claim that the auxiliary is should be
grouped with the verb before it gets grouped with anything else, while others would prefer to
leave it for the last. I'm going to go with the latter solution.

[[[The girl] [with [the blue barrette]]] is [speaking [to [that quiet boy]]]]
OK, now we have a diagram for the entire sentence. And now perhaps you can see why this type
of diagram is called a tree diagram.
2
The important thing is having this visual diagram of the
organization of the sentence. Every one of the points where two lines meet or one line branches
off from another is called a node. The ends down here, each one corresponding to a single
word, are called nodes too; specifically, they're called terminal nodes.
But we're not done. It's not enough to simply identify which words go with which other words at
what level. We also need to recognize that there are different kinds of words here. We would
all agree that girl, boy, and barrette are the same kind of word they're nouns while
speaking is a verb. So we can label them as follows, using the abbreviations N and V for
noun and verb. We shall also treat the and that as the same kind of word, which we can
call determiner and abbreviate DET. To and with are prepositions, which we abbreviate
P. Blue and quiet are both adjectives, which we abbreviate A; and we're going to give is
the label AUX, for auxiliary.

DET N P DET A N AUX V P DET A N
[[[The girl] [with [the blue barrette]]] is [speaking [to [that quiet boy]]]]
OK, so we've labelled all the individual words according to their parts of speech. But what about
these other constituents, these other nodes? They get labels too. First of all, every one of them
is considered a phrase, and that's part of their label. The two phrases the blue barrette and that
quiet boy are called noun phrases on the basis of the substitution test discussed in the previous
chapter; since they can occupy the same syntactic position as simple nouns like dimples or John
as in (1), then by the terms of the substitution test they must belong to the same syntactic category,
or at least have something in common. So since the blue barrette and that quiet boy can be
substituted for simple nouns, we conclude that they partake of the nature of nouns and so we call
them noun phrases or NPs. We can write NP on these nodes here.
(1) The girl with dimples is speaking to J ohn.


2
Even though it's an upside-down tree!
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NP NP
DET N P DET A N AUX V P DET A N
[[[The girl] [with [the blue barrette]]] is [speaking [to [that quiet boy]]]]
Note that the longer phrase the girl with the blue barrette also qualifies as a noun phrase. Simi-
larly, the entire phrase beginning with speaking can be replaced by a single verb; in fact, speak-
ing can exist by itself without anything following it, without any object or modifier; The girl is
speaking is a perfectly good English sentence. Or we could replace it with sleep, or any one
of a number of intransitive verbs. So according to the substitution test we must recognize that
this whole phrase shares some quality with lexical verbs, and so we call this thing a verb phrase
or VP.

NP VP
NP NP
DET N P DET A N AUX V P DET A N
[[[The girl] [with [the blue barrette]]] is [speaking [to [that quiet boy]]]]
What about the phrases with the blue barrette and to that boy? This is a little more complica-
ted, but from the point of view of syntax at least phrases like these are generally labelled prepo-
sitional phrases or PPs. We don't have time in this class to go into the controversial issues sur-
rounding this label; we'll accept the general consensus of linguists down through the centuries
and call these things PPs.
What about the whole sentence? Well, obviously, it's a sentence, and that's usually abbreviated
S. The only problem with that abbreviation is that the label S is used not only of simple sen-
tences like this one but of all clauses, including subordinate clauses like the ones in (2). Now
obviously, while they go to school in the morning is not a complete sentence. But it's a clause,
with a subject and a verbal predicate and so on, and in modern syntactic research there is a con-
vention that clauses are labelled S whether they are complete sentences or not. It's a conven-
tion i'm not entirely happy with, but that's the way it is.
(2) [
S
[
S
While they go to school in the morning], [
S
the girl will speak to that boy]]
So now we have a complete tree-diagram of this sentence. In the process of erecting this diagram,
we have organized this sentence into different kinds of categories and thereby provided a struc-
ture for the sentence; we call this a phrase-structure diagram.
3

3
Iin syntactic research we often abbreviate trees; if for instance we are only talking about a particular NP within a
sentence and not about the contents of that NP, we often don't bother spelling out those details. But it's worth
knowing that they're there even so.
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S
NP VP

PP PP
NP NP
DET N P DET A N AUX V P DET A N
[[[The girl] [with [the blue barrette]]] is [speaking [to [that quiet boy]]]]
Phrase-Structure Rules
What we've just done is draw up a phrase-structure tree-diagram analyzing a particular sentence.
It's time now to move on to a broader perspective and to consider how such tree-diagrams are
built in general. Remember, one thing we're concerned about is that while some combinations
of words are grammatical in a given language others are not, and we need some way of distin-
guishing between grammatical and ungrammatical strings.
What syntacticians have established is that, in a particular language, there are certain general
patterns to the way tree-diagrams are organized. These patterns are often referred to as phrase-
structure rules, or, as that phrase is usually abbreviated, PS-rules. It's important to understand
right away that these are not rules like the ones that may have run your life when you were in
grade school or the laws that provide the structure for a civilized society. A rule or law of that
sort says something like It is illegal to drive down a street on the left-hand side; if a policeman
catches you doing so, you will have to pay a fine. No, when we're talking about PS-rules, we're
talking about something more like a law of nature the sort of thing that says, If you drive
down a street on the wrong side, you may be hit by another car, and both cars will be damaged.
A PS-rule is a statement about what is, and is not, a possible syntactic structure in a given language.
And the way we find out what the PS-rules of a given language are is basically the same way we
find out anything in science: We look at the evidence (in this case, actual sentences and tree-
diagrams of those sentences) and try to recognize the patterns that describe the evidence.
Let's start by figuring out what PS-rules describe this tree-diagram. Starting at the top, we've got
an S node which is dominating, as we say, three other nodes, an NP node, an AUX node, and a
VP node. We can write this out as in (3). A bit of terminology here. Syntactic constituents are
almost always spoken of with feminine imagery; i don't know why, nobody's ever been able to
give me a good explanation as to why; but in a PS-rule, the thing on the left side of the arrow is
called the mother, and the things on the right side are called its daughters. It's important to un-
derstand that, in a proper PS-rule, there can be only one mother, though in principle there can be
any number of daughters. Note that a typical PS-rule says two things: 1 It states what daughters
a constituent may have, and 2 It states what order they can come in.
(3) S NP AUX VP
Now, the rule in (3) mentions AUX. And certainly, as we have defined the term, the sentence
The girl with the blue barrette is speaking to that quiet boy does include an AUX constituent.
But is this really necessary? Does every sentence in English include an AUX? What about the
sentences in (4)? Let's grant that AUX appears to be an optional constituent. The way we re-
present optional constituents in a PS-rule is to enclose them in parentheses, so we can amend the
rule as in (5) by putting AUX in parentheses: (AUX).
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(4) a. Sam came to school yesterday.
b. Terry likes chocolate.
c. Hilary reads a lot of books.
(5) S NP (AUX) VP
Let's move on to the next level. Our tree-diagram include three NPs. We can describe each of
them by one of the rules in (6ab). Obviously, the adjective and the PP are optional, so we can
put them both in parentheses as in (6c). What about the DET? Is it necessary? Although arti-
cles aren't as optional in English as in a lot of other languages, it must be admitted that the NPs
in (6df) are perfectly good NPs and therefore that articles are to someextent optional in English.
So we can put that in parentheses too, as in (6g).
(6) a. NP DET N PP
b. NP DET A N
c. NP DET (A) N (PP)
d. [
NP
Dogs] do [
NP
tricks].
e. [
NP
I] have [
NP
doubts] about [
NP
that].
f. Does [
NP
air] move [
NP
things]?
g. NP (DET) (A) N (PP)
Now, it's possible to have an NP with several adjectives, as in (7). The 3 adjectives in this NP
are independent of each other; each one could occur by itself, and they could occur in any order.
In order to allow for an unlimited number of optional adjectives, syntacticians make use of a
notational convention involving an asterisk, as in (8). Note that this asterisk is different than the
asterisk used to indicate ungrammaticality. In technical terms, we don't actually call this thing
an asterisk at all; we call it a Kleene star. And it means as many as you like, including none.
(7) a large fierce black dog
(8) NP (DET) (A)* N (PP)
Now let's talk about the VP. This particular VP, speaking to that quiet boy, can be described
by the rule in (9). But obviously not all of this is necessary. It's possible, isn't it, for a verb phrase
to consist of a simple verb all by itself, as in (10)? So the PP should really be in parentheses.
On the other hand, there are lots of transitive verbs taking NP objects, and those objects have to
be included in this rule somehow. But where should they be fit in? Remember, the PS-rule for-
mat we're working with specifies not only the possible daughters of a given category but the order
they may come it. If we have both an NP object and a PP in a VP, where do they occur in relation
to each other? Look at (11). This suggests that an NP object has to come between the verb and
a PP, doesn't it? So it looks like we should insert an optional NP between the verb and the PP in
(9), doesn't it? But should it be just one NP? Look at (12). Some English verbs can take two
NP objects. So our VP rule should really be something like (13).
(9) VP V PP
(10) a. The owl slept.
b. The horse ran.
(11) a. filled the box to the brim
b. *filled to the brim the box
(12) a. gave the baby a ball
b. read me a story
(13) VP V (NP) (NP) (PP)
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There are two PPs in our sentence the girl with the blue barrette is speaking to that quiet boy,
and both of them can be described by the PS-rule in (14). I don't think i need to say anything
more about that. The fact that the NPs the blue barrette and that quiet boy each have a cer-
tain amount of internal structure is covered by the NP rule in (6b).
(14) PP P NP
I've already mentioned adjectives, in connection with the introduction of the Kleene star notation.
But now it's time to talk about adjective phrases, or APs. Now in the sentence we began this
chapter looking at there are merely two adjectives, separate from each other, so even if we were
to regard each of these as actually an AP (which from the point of view of syntactic theory would
actually be quite reasonable) they would be extremely simple APs, each consisting of a single
word, a single adjective and nothing else. But obviously it's possible for APs to be more complex
then that. Adjectives, which modify nouns, can themselves be modified by adverbs as shown in
(15). In fact, it should be noted that adverbs modifying adjectives (or verbs, for that matter) may
themselves be modified by other adverbs, adverbs of a peculiar type referred to as degree adverbs,
as shown in (16), so we need to be able to define adverb phrases or ADVPs as in (17). And
like NPs and VPs APs can also include PPs as in (18); it is even possible for an AP to be modified
by a whole clause as in (19). So in order to describe all these possibilities we need a PS-rule
like the one in (20).
(15) a. very tired
b. especially kind
c. randomly scattered
(16) a. [very randomly] scattered
b. speak [too quietly]
(17) AdvP (Deg) Adv
(18) a. very tired [of the ride]
b. kind [to his mother]
c. proud [of her daughter]
(19) That dog is [so fierce that nobody can get within 5m of him without his barking
viciously and tugging at his chain].
(20) AP (ADVP) A (PP) (S)

Heads, Complements, Modifiers
There is something very important to notice about the PS-rules in (619). A noun phrase (NP)
always includes a noun (N); a verb phrase (VP) always includes a verb (V); a prepositional phrase
(PP) always includes a preposition (P), an adjective phrase (AP) always includes an adjective
(AP), etc. This may seem obvious at a certain level, but it's worth taking note of; it is, in fact, a
fundamental assertion of modern syntactic theory. With few exceptions, every phrase must in-
clude a head, a word whose own category defines the category of the entire phrase. Every NP is
assumed to be headed by a noun, every VP by a verb, etc.
The other constituents within a phrase, the non-heads, can be classified into two types. Some of
them are complements. Please don't confuse this word with compliments; they're spelled slightly
differently, though for most English-speakers they are virtually indistinguishable in pronunciation.
167
A compliment () is a statement of praise or appreciation. A complement () is something
that completes something else. In grammar, it's understood that some words, by their very nature,
4

require certain other kinds of constituents in order to make sense. This is most obvious in the case
of verbs. Every human language has the distinction between transitive () and intransitive
() verbs. Intransitive verbs like sleep in (21a) don't need anything else and can form a
VP all by themselves. Transitive verbs like see in (21b) require complements of some kind.
What kind of complement(s) a particular verb requires varies over a fairly wide range. Some
verbs, like see, are content with a single NP. Some, like consider in (21c), can take a pair of
NP complements. Some, like talk in (21d), take PP complements. Some, like hope in (21e),
take whole clauses.
(21) a. The baby slept.
b. We saw the Purple Bridge.
c. Many people consider Sun Yat-Sen a great man.
d. I talked to your sister.
e. We hope you will be able to come tomorrow night.
The kinds of complements that a particular head requires are referred to collectively as that word's
valency or subcategorization frame; we can say that a transitive verb like see or talk subca-
tegorizes for an NP complement, or a PP complement, or whatever.
It isn't only verbs that have subcategorization frames. Prepositions, almost by definition, require
NP complements.
5
Nouns and adjectives can also take complements, usually in the form of PPs,
and some seem to require them, at least in certain contexts or usages; cf. argument, purchase,
or belief in (22) or afraid in (23). Such details of valency usually need to be specified in a
word's lexical entry.
(22) a. Todd had an argument with J oe about the purchase of a new car.
b. Elmer's belief that the Earth is flat is not amenable to any rational refutation.
(23) a. Morgan's little brother is afraid of the dark.
b. Hortense is afraid that some of the porcupines might get hurt.
Non-head constituents that are not complements, i.e. are not called for the head's subcategoriza-
tion frame, are usually grouped under the general label modifiers. These include adjective
phrases in NPs and adverb phrases in VPs and APs.
Transformations
The PS-rules we've been discussing so far can describe or generate sentences like those in (24).
They will also generate sentences like those in (25). But they will not, by themselves, account
for the fact that fluent users of English tend to regard each of the sentences in (25) as being rela-
ted in some way to the corresponding sentence in (24). And yet, as noted at the end of the pre-
vious chapter, this kind of relationship is one of the things syntactic theory is supposed to be
able to account for.

4
Which has a lot to do with what they mean, though that's not enough by itself to explain their behaviour; consider,
for instance, the pair of English verbs talk and tell. You can either tell a person something or tell something to
a person, but you can only talk you can only talk to a person about something.
5
Indeed, i'm inclined to regard prepositions in languages like English as merely transitive adverbs, adverbs that
happen to require NP complements.
168
(24) a. The girl gave a toy to the baby.
b. The student was reading a book.
(25) a. The girl gave the baby a toy.
b. The book was read by the student.
Furthermore, the PS-rules we've developed so far may be able to describe or generate a sentence
like the one in (26a), but they can't account for the sentences in (26bc). And yet, not only are
the strings in (26bc) perfectly good sentences of English, but again, the fluent English user sen-
ses that they are somehow related to the sentence in (26a), and this sense of kinship between
these sentences must be accounted for somehow.
(26) a. The student was reading a book.
b. Was the student reading a book?
c. What was the student reading?
This is, however, one of the areas in which controversy is liveliest in syntactic theory. While all
syntactic theorists agree that it's part of our job to account for relationships like these, we differ
seriously in the means by which we do it or think it should be done. I discuss this issue in greater
depth elsewhere; here i will merely mention that within Noam Chomsky's Standard Theory
these relationships between sentences are typically described by transformations. Basically, a
transformation is a grammatical rule saying that one PS tree may be related to another PS tree
having a certain constituent in a different place; in a very metaphorical sense, the transformation
can be said to move a constituent from one part of the tree to another; i've indicated this by the
arrows in (27). Syntacticians working in the Standard Theory are concerned to identify what
transformations are possible or impossible within a given language, or within the class of all
languages generally, and how they work.
(27) a. The girl gave [a toy] to [the baby]. The girl gave [the baby] [a toy] to .
b. The student was reading a book. Was the student reading a book?
c. [The student] read [the book]. [The book] was read by [the student].

Constituent-Order Typology
You will perhaps remember that typology is a favourite subject of mine. I spoke to you in Chapter
1 about the typology of inflexional morphology. Later, i spoke about the typology of phonemes
and segments in human speech, and later still about the typology of writing systems. Well, there's
a typological approach to syntax too. Typically, it has to do with the order of constituents within
the typical sentence.
This is sometimes referred to as Word Order Typology, but i insist on referring to it as Con-
stituent Order Typology. The things that make up a sentence are constituents. Some con-
stituents are single words, but some are phrases. When people talk about word order, whether
in English or J apanese, they're usually thinking about sentences like (28), in which at least in
one sense, remembering our discussion earlier about what is or is not a word there are only
three words, one each for the subject, object, and verb.
169
(28) a. J ohn saw Sally.
b. Taroo-ga Mariko-o yonda.
Taroo saw Mariko.
But we all know that subjects and objects can be NPs made up of many words as in (29). These
things aren't words, they're extremely long and complex phrases, and yet when linguists talk about
word order, they're very often actually talking about things like this. I and a few other linguists
have complained about this on occasion, in public and in print. What we're really talking about
at this point is the order of constituents within sentences; later on we'll have something to say
about the order of words, and other constituents, within phrases.
(29) a. [
NP
The fine upstanding young fellow who regularly spends his Saturdays building
houses for poor people] saw [
NP
the intelligent and beautiful young princess who
was really getting irritated at the way everybody stared at her.]
b. [
NP
Kare-no okaasan-ga genki-datta koro-no Taroo-ga] [
NP
Mariko-ga kare-ni
okutta tegami-o] mada yonde inai.
Taroo under the circumstances of his mother being well =At the time his mother
was well, Taroo had not read the letter Mariko sent to him.
At the broadest level, syntactic typology is concerned with the order of what are sometimes called
the major sentence constituents.
6
These are the subject (), the object (), and the verb
(). For convenience, we usually ab-breviate these S, O, and V. And the basic question in
syntactic typology at this level is: Does a given language prefer a specific order of these consti-
tuents, and if so which is it? Those of you with some math background may be able to figure
out that there are logically six possibilities, as shown in (30).
(30) SOV SVO VSO
VOS OVS OSV
Alright, let's start with the languages we know best. Where do you think Chinese belongs in this
list? What does Chinese prefer among the six possible orderings of subject, object, and verb?
Right. What about English? Right, they both prefer SVO. What about Japanese? Do any of you
know enough about J apanese to answer this question? J apanese prefers SOV; so does Korean,
so i'm told. Sanskrit and most of its modern relatives in India go in the SOV slot too. I'm told
the same is true of Tibetan and Amharic, a language of Ethiopia. German too, although it's not
obvious at first. Statistically, most German sentences are SVO, at least on the surface. But there
is evidence that they're really SOV under the surface. The behaviour of complex verbs, and of
all verbs in subordinate clauses, gives that away.
Most of the other major European languages, such as Italian, Russian, Finnish, etc. seem to be-
long in the SVO camp, as do Vietnamese and Hausa, a language of central Africa. There's one
small group of European languages, the Celtic family, whose members prefer VSO: Welsh, Irish,
Breton. Arabic belongs here too. So does Rukai; anybody here ever hear of the Rukai language?
It's native to this island. Maori, Hawaiian, and Tongan are also VSO languages.
Rukai, Maori, Hawaiian, and Tongan are members of a large family of languages called the Aus-
tronesian family, most of whose members prefer to put the verb at the beginning of the clause.
Among the Austronesian family are a few VOS languages, notably Fijian and Malagasy.

6
though some of us prefer the German term Satzglieder.
170
In the 1970's a few languages were found down in the Amazon river basin in South America that
as far as we can tell prefer either OSV or OVS order. These are languages like Hixkaryana,
Jamamadi, Apurina, and Makusi. So as you can see in (31), every single possible preferred order
of subject, object, and verb is represented among the world's languages; for every conceivable
order, there are at least a few human languages that prefer that order.
(31) SOV J apanese, Korean, Sanskrit, Hindi, Tibetan, Amharic, German
SVO Chinese, English, French, Italian, Russian, Finnish, Vietnamese, Hausa
VSO Welsh, Breton, Irish, Arabic, Rukai, Maori, Hawaiian, Tongan
VOS Fijian, Malagasy
OVS Hixkaryana, Makusi
OSV J amamadi, Apurina
But by how much? Notice how much longer the first three lines in (31) are than the last three.
Over 75% of the world's languages prefer either SOV or SVO order; VSO accounts for another
1015%.
7
That's about 90% for only half the logical possibilities; the other three account for
only about 10% at most of human languages.
Why? What is it about these orders that makes them so much favoured over these others among
human languages? Notice that the one thing they have in common is that they put the subject be-
fore the object. On the basis of this evidence, linguists believe that there is a strong preference
among human languages for putting the subject before the object, even stronger than putting the
subject before the verb though that seems to be important too.
8
We suspect that this says some-
thing important about how the human mind works, but we don't yet know what.

The extreme rarity of object-before-subject languages, and OSV or OVS languages in particular,
has led some science fiction writers to use these orders deliberately in order to make some of their
characters sound especially alien. I don't know how this comes across in the Chinese-language
version of Star Wars (), but in the English original the Jedi Master Yoda routinely comes
out with sentences like those in (32). And when the first Star Trek movies were being made in
the late 70's and early 80's, someone connected with that project designed a language for Klingon
characters to speak, and deliberately made it an OVS language. Even though most of us can't
understand a word the Klingons say (and many of us probably wouldn't want to!), the idea seems
to have been to make their language as unlike human language as possible while still being re-
cognizable as a language.
(32) Yoda-Speak (examples of OSV)
a. [Help you] I can.
b. [Strong with the Force] you are.
c. [Your father] he is.
d. When [900 years] you reach, [look as good] you will not!

7
The VSO line in (31) may look as long as those above it, but that's because i beefed it up for local interest; here on
Taiwan, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, there are an awful lot of VSO languages not too far away.
8
Personally, i've gotten rather curious about the dynamics of VOS languages, which is one reason i've gotten inter-
ested in studying Austronesian languages. But as you can see, even among Austronesian languages VOS langua-
ges are in the minority.
171

Fig. 8.1 Make Sure Your Grammar Teacher is Using the Right Grammar!

We've looked at the order of the major clause constituents, but there's also some interesting things
to be said about the order of words within clauses. Let's look first at the order of words within
NPs; in (3334) i've given some NPs from English and French, and in each case i've underlined
the nouns to clearly distinguish them from their modifying adjectives, etc. You're probably all
aware that English prefers to put adjectives before nouns, as in (33ab); however, it's possible in
English to put long adjective phrases after nouns, as in (33cd). French is kind of the opposite
of English in this respect, in that it prefers to put adjectives after nouns, as you can see from (34a
b). However, there are some NPs in which the adjective comes before the noun; i've given some
examples in (34cd). This situation is not, note, the exact equivalent of the situation in English.
It isn't that unusually long adjective phrases in French typically precede nouns while those in Eng-
lish typically follow them; the adjective phrases in (34cd) aren't particularly long, in fact you'll
notice that the adjectives in (34bc) are essentially the same adjective, it's just that for some reason
this adjective goes after the head noun if it's describing a house but before the head noun if it's
describing a boy.
(33) N-A order in English
a. cold water c. nature red in tooth and claw
b. a big house d. a book hard to come by
(34) N-A order in French
a. l'eau froide cold water c. un grand garon a big boy
b. une maison grande a big house d. une jolie jeune fille a pretty young girl
In Chinese, however, as far as i can tell all modifiers, no matter how long and complex they are,
have to go before the words they modify. Witness the phrases in (35), as compared with their
English translations.
(35) a. [] people [who can speak Chinese]
b. [] these characters [that your daughter wrote]
c. [] the two owls [sitting on my computer]

d. [] two cute girls [with umbrellas]
Languages can differ in the order of constituents within PPs; cf. (36). Languages like J apanese
in which the NP object of a PP comes first are often said to have postpositions rather than pre-
positions, since the elements in question come after their complements rather than before. Lin-
guists often talk in general about adpositions when they don't want to specify which side of
the complement these things show up. In some languages, like English and French, the adposi-
tions are all prepositions, coming before their complements. In others, like J apanese and Hindi,
they're all postpositions. And some languages, like Amharic, have both.
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(36) a. English: from Tokyo
b. J apanese: Tokyo kara
Syntactic typologists are particularly interested in the possibility of making generalizations about
the order of various kinds of constituents. It's been noticed that the order of the head and the
complements in one particular kind of phrase is often repeated in other kinds of phrases. For
instance, in J apanese and Hindi the verb comes at the end of the VP, after its objects, the adpo-
sitions are postpositions, coming after their NP complements, and head nouns come at the ends
of NPs, after all their modifiers, while in English the verb comes before its object, the adpositions
are all prepositions, coming before their NP complements, and the head noun comes before any
PP modifiers. However, while German is basically a verb-final language, it has prepositions in-
stead of postpositions. And although English nouns precede PP modifiers, they normally follow
adjective modifiers; French is rather more consistent in that it puts the verb before its object,
preposes adpositions, and normally puts both adjective and PP modifiers after nouns, although
as we have seen even in French the adjective may sometimes precede the noun it modifies. And
Chinese differs from both English and French in this respect, while agreeing with both of them
in prefering to put the verb in the middle of the clause; in fact, in many respects with regard to
constituent-order typology Chinese behaves a lot more like the languages of India, most of which
are SOV languages. Syntactic theorists and typologists spend a lot of their time studying issues
like this, trying to make sense out of them.
Back in Chapter 1 i said that languages can be classified in many different ways and that typology
is the study of these different ways. Now that i've introduced both morphological and syntactic
typology, it's worthwhile to compare these two approaches a little bit. Back in Chapter 1 i noted
that languages could be classified into several different categories (e.g. isolating, agglutinatng,
sythetic) on the basis of how much inflexional morphology they have and how it works. In this
chapter, i've noted that languages can also be classified in terms of which order of the major sen-
tence constituents (subject, object, verb) they prefer. As can be seen from Fig. 8.2, these different
approaches to classification yield different results. Different linguists are going to be interested
in different things and therefore in different classifications; a morphologist is probably going to
be more interested in the difference between isolating and inflecting languages, while a syntac-
tician is probably going to be more interested in the difference between verb-final and verb-initial
languages, or between verb-medial and verb-peripheral languages.

SOV SVO VSO
isolating Burmese Chinese, Vietnamese Samoan, Hawaiian
agglutinating
Turkish, J apanese,
Basque
Hungarian, Finnish,
Swahili

synthetic Latin, Sanskrit Greek, Russian Irish, Arabic
Fig. 8.2 Different Typological Approaches
But beyond that, it is possible to look at a table like the one in Fig. 8.2 or, preferably, a more
complete table with a lot more languages listed in it and pick out those languages that share
both a syntactic type and a morphological type. One might be interested in examining specifically
agglutinating SOV languages, say, or inflecting VSO languages. There might be something very
interesting and worth saying about languages that meet such pairs of typological criteria. And
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one could, of course, make such a complex classification even more complex by bringing in, e.g.,
phonological considerations such as constraints on syllable structure which languages allow
closed syllables (syllables ending in consonants)? Which languages allow consonant clusters?
It's when they find the business of language-classification interacting at such different levels that
typologists often find their work getting most interesting.
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