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WORD ORDER VARIATIONS AND THEIR DISCURSIVE IMPLICATIONS IN

SHABAKI

Research Proposal · January 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30740.71040

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Abbas H J Sultan
University Of Kufa
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 WORD ORDER VARIATIONS AND THEIR DISCURSIVE
IMPLICATIONS IN SHABAKI

Abbas H J Sultan
University of Kufa
ahjsultan@gmail.com

Abstract
Word order types constitute the most well-established and frequently cited
generalization in language typology. Basic or canonical word order tends to fall
into two mail types: SOV (about 48% of world languages) or SVO (about
41%). SOV is assumed to have been the predominant and unmarked word
order in most of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, as well as in
Iranian languages. This paper investigates the basic word order in Shabaki, a
modern northwest language of the Indo-Iranian family spoken by Shabaki
minority in Iraq. This study also measures the word order variation and
provides a typological description of this language. An examination of Shabaki
data reveals that Shabaki follows SOV, OSV, SVO, VSO, and OVS word order
patterns. The most frequent (predominant and unmarked) word order in
declarative sentences in Shabaki is SOV where the initial position is occupied
by a nominative noun phrase, but constituents can appear at any position,
creating grammatical sentences with different discursive distributions. That is,
different word orders have different syntactic and discursive implications.
Object fronting foregrounds the object and is semantically contentful, whereas
postposing discursively backgrounds the sentence-initial subject and is
semantically vacuous.

Key words: backgrounding, basic word order, foregrounding, language typology, non-
configurational languages, Shabaki

Word count: 220 words

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