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Tlingit: An Object-Initial Language?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Matthew S. Dryer
Matthew S. Dryer*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

A number of early grammatical descriptions of Tlingit, a non-Athapaskan Na-Dene language spoken in southeast Alaska and in adjacent areas of Canada, describe the language as being OSV. Evidence is presented in this paper that Tlingit is not OSV.

Until recent years, it was thought that of the six logically possible word orders of subject, verb, and object, only SOV, SVO, VSO, and VOS existed. (See for example Pullum 1977). Since then, however, evidence for the existence of object-initial languages has been presented by Derbyshire (1977) and Derbyshire and Pullum (1981). Almost all of the object-initial languages discussed by Derbyshire and Pullum are spoken in or near the Amazon basin in South America. There is to date no clear case of an object-initial language spoken outside of South America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 1985 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1985

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