Languages vary regarding the basic orders of words that they allow in a neutral, out-of-the-blue sentence. For instance, in English or Russian direct objects typically follow the verb, which makes English and Russian Verb-Object, or VO, languages; in contrast, in Turkish or Japanese direct objects precede the verb, which makes them Object-Verb, or OV, languages. In OV languages, the verb is usually the very last element in the clause, but, under a closer look, some of them allow certain material to follow the verb, under certain conditions. The post-verbal clausal domain of OV languages remains severely understudied, which is surprising, given that a better understanding of the rules that apply to the post-verbal domain can give us indispensable clues for understanding other linguistic processes, such as OV languages turning into VO languages over time.
I propose that the restrictions on post-verbal clausal constituents in OV languages can only be explained through the understanding of the role that prosody, or intonation, plays in them. According to this idea, the availability and types of post-verbal constituents in OV languages are regulated by their prosodic properties (e.g. accented vs. unaccented). This approach is recent but has already produced fruitful results.
The objective of this project has been to test this hypothesis on Basque, a minority OV language of Europe, surrounded by majority VO languages, Spanish and French. Basque is a uniquely fitting testbed for the prosody-centric approach: Basque dialects differ from each other in their prosodic properties and availability and frequency of post-verbal material. Neither the correlation between these two facts, predicted by the prosody-centric hypothesis, nor the interconnections between the syntactic, prosodic, and information-structural properties of post-verbal material in Basque or the role of contact with VO languages in shaping them have yet been investigated.
The project centers around collecting and analyzing syntactic and prosodic data from a variety of Basque dialects and comparing them to those from other OV languages. Pursuing this research is of vital importance for linguistic theory: without it, our understanding of basic clausal syntax, and the changes it can undergo, would be incomplete.
