Intransitive clause word order in Neo-Aramaic: information structure, pragmatics and word order shifts

Abstract

This paper studies quantitatively intransitive constructions in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, and their implications for Neo-Aramaic word order typology (historically, ‘subject-verb-object’). Though not considered previously, transitivity proves to be a significant factor in Neo-Aramaic word order variation. The differences between the intransitive Subject and the transitive Agent in Neo-Aramaic are a product of their divergent information-structural tendencies, as well as, it would seem, their basic syntactic preferences. Unidentifiable (i.e. indefinite, old) Subjects largely follow the verb, which fits with the larger tendency for pre-verbal arguments to be topical. Identifiable arguments, however, have roughly equal pre- and post-verbal frequencies in the corpus, when jointly considered. A deeper analysis considers referential distance and lexical-pragmatic factors. I propose that VS for identifiable Subjects is more likely for functions associated with ‘discourse discontinuity’, being less likely for foreground events. This distribution in Neo-Aramaic hints at a functional versatility of the VS structure, which is thus not restricted to a single construction such as sentence focus. By contrast, in (co-territorial Qəltu) Arabic, transitivity and topicality are less significant for word order variation. Finally, comparative data from Neo-Aramaic varieties of different word order profiles reveal the instability of the VS clause amidst larger word order changes. The cross-dialectal data show that the loss of the VS clause correlates very closely with the ‘verb-object’ to ‘object-verb’ shift. While Aramaic would have started as ‘(Agent-)verb-object’, some Neo-Aramaic dialects show increasing rates of ‘object-verb’.