Book contents
1 - Word order
setting the scene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Many students of foreign languages will agree that one of the first things that they discover (on their own) about their target languages concerns word order, that is, the way words are arranged in a particular linear order in sentences. Word order may be one of the most conspicuous differences between one’s native language and target languages. For instance, Korean learners of English quickly realize that while the verb in Korean comes last in a sentence, the verb in English comes much earlier, that is, after the subject noun phrase (NP). In fact, one of the English grammar-translation rules often imparted to Korean students is about word order. For example, consider the following Korean sentence and its English translation:
(1) mayli-ka kongwen-eyse thom-ul man-ass-ta
Mary-NOM park-LOC Tom-ACC meet-PST-IND
‘Mary met Tom in the park.’
The Korean-to-English (or English-to-Korean) ‘word-order rule’ in question consists of two steps (setting aside morphological differences between the two languages, including core case marking): (1) translate the subject NP and put it in the first position of the sentence; and (2) go to the end of the sentence and translate the remaining constituents in reverse order (i.e. X-Y-Z ⇒ Z-Y-X). This means that the subject NP (Mary) comes first, as in the original Korean sentence. From that point on, however, the Korean-to-English translation proceeds from right to left. The subject NP should thus be immediately followed by the verb met for man-ass-ta. Next comes the object NP (Tom for thom(-ul)). These three constituents should all be followed by the English word in, translated from the Korean (non-core) locative case marker -eyse. Finally, the locative NP (the park) for kongwen appears as the last constituent of the sentence. That is to say Mary, met, Tom, in and the park, in that order, appear one after the other in the (grammatical) English sentence. Needless to say, this is just a rule of thumb, and a rough one at that, but it does provide an important insight into the word-order differences between the two languages.
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- Word Order , pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012