A STUDY OF ASPECT, WORD ORDER, AND VOICE

This dissertation investigates aspect and the manner in which it is reflected in word order and voice alternations. It addresses the relationship between the form of a sentence, in terms of subject-verb order and voice, and its pragmatic and aspectual characteristics. A variety of syntactic structures from a large number of languages are described, both in terms of formal characteristics and in terms of function. Multivariate analysis is used to correlate pragmatic and structural factors with the use of one or another construction. It is shown that, in a given language, the function of variation in order of subject and verb is directly related to the frequency of subject-verb order as opposed to verb-subject order, so that the most strongly verb-subject languages use subject-verb order in certain situations and the most strongly subject-verb languages use verb-subject order in certain situations. In between, there is a continuum of language types, with the function of subject-verb order shifting from one end of the continuum to the other. This shift is documented with quantitative studies of Mayan and Romance languages with varying frequencies of verb-subject order; these studies show that as we look at languages with increasingly frequent subject-verb order, the function of subject-verb order changes, so that looking along a continuum of language types, certain functions of subject-verb order "fade out" and others "fade in". Additionally, the inventory of grammatical categories in a given language is directly tied to the frequency of subject-verb order; because of the pragmatic characteristics of strongly verb-subject languages, they do not go through certain diachronic processes which subject-verb languages go through, and therefore do not develop certain grammatical categories. This dissertation also examines ergative case-marking systems, which have different functions in different languages. Based on data from Austronesian and other language families, it is shown that ergative constructions develop from passive constructions, and further that the function of an ergative construction is directly tied to the function of the passive construction from which it has developed.