V3 word order?

[Ulrike Meinhof]

Are there any languages with what I suppose would be the SOV equivalent of V2 word order: V3 word order? For example:

I you hug
today I hug you

she him kisses
often she kisses him

This would naturally only work with transitive verbs.

[masako]

I you hug
today I hug you

she him kisses
often she kisses him

My conlang works this way, but I suppose you're asking about natlangs...?

na'eta opyeti - I you hug

iyoma na'eta opyeti - today I you hug

ha'eha kapela - she him kisses

sipa ha'eha kapela - often she kisses him

[Ulrike Meinhof]

My conlang works this way, but I suppose you're asking about natlangs...?

na'eta opyeti - I you hug

iyoma na'eta opyeti - today I you hug

ha'eha kapela - she him kisses

sipa ha'eha kapela - often she kisses him

How is that V3? The word order doesn't change when you add the adverb.

But yes, I meant natlangs.

[Yng]

With sentences with only a subject and a verb, would this default to V2?

I've wondered this myself, actually.

[Radius Solis]

There is no good reason for any language to have V3, and I would predict that no such will be found. There is a misconception at work here: despite its name, the point of V2 is not where the verb goes. Rather it's about having a special position in front of it where only one piece of information can go, marking it as having special salience, such as "topic" or "focus" status. In Germanic langs this of course is typically the subject, but other V2 langs make the situation clearer, or at least O'odham does - in that language, any kind of information can go in the preverbal position so long as it is the focal information of the sentence. Including direct objects, or negators, or even adjectives extracted from their noun phrases elsewhere in the clause. (O'odham is V2 but nonconfigurational.)

So basically V2 is about using the verb as a divider between focused information and everything else, as a way to mark it. V3 would accomplish no such task.

However, I would not be blown away if it were discovered that there are languages with the direct opposite of V2, where the verb is always the second element from the right. That seems more plausible than V3, at least.

[Colz]

According to my Armenian teacher (who has also studied linguistics, so she's probably not making things up like native speakers often do), the copula / auxiliary verbs always comes third in declarative sentences.

[Silk]

opyeti

Is this word derived from Russian объятие?

[Ulrike Meinhof]

There is a misconception at work here: despite its name, the point of V2 is not where the verb goes. Rather it's about having a special position in front of it where only one piece of information can go, marking it as having special salience, such as "topic" or "focus" status.

That makes sense and clarifies a lot, thanks.

In Germanic langs this of course is typically the subject, but other V2 langs make the situation clearer, or at least O'odham does - in that language, any kind of information can go in the preverbal position so long as it is the focal information of the sentence. Including direct objects, or negators, or even adjectives extracted from their noun phrases elsewhere in the clause.

Swedish (and I suppose Norwegian and Danish as well) allows a lot of stuff to go there too. The equivalents of "Tall knew I not that he was", "Not knew I that", "The prime rate (O) raised the central bank (S)" and "Fast ran she" are all grammatical.

My, perhaps not plausible, idea for a V3 SOV language, is that it would do something like:

1SG.nom 2SG.acc hug
'I hug you' (where the nominative is unmarked)

then 1SG.acc hug 2SG.obl
'then I hugged you', lit. 'then (S) hugged me [some oblique relation marker] you'

Which doesn't make much semantic sense, but looks cool.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

What RS is saying is that "V2 Language" is not a concept centered on the verb, but a concept where you have a language that explicitly has Topic-Comment, where the topic part is madatory and the initial part of the comment is the auxiliary (or verb if there is no auxiliary). The equivalent would be having a language where you have Comment-Topic, and its basic word order would have to be OVS (or EVA, for ergative languages).

The question here would be to find a language where the Topic would go at the end of the sentence. If you find that, V-second-to-last languages would be possible. I don't know of any, but I don't know many languages. But perhaps, for pragmatic reasons, such languages don't exist, so the possible concept would be moot.

French can look like V3 vernacularly, when you have a topic.

Demain je m'en vais à l'école.
Tommorow I (me from it) go to the school.
Avec ma soeur je m'en vais à l'école.
With my sister I (me from it) go to the school.

If you analyse the pronouns as being prefixes to the main verb, you can still see V3-type sentences :

Avec ma soeur demain je m'en vais à l'école.
With my sister tommorow I (me from it) go to school.

But that's not being V3, it's fronting two topics.

Tkalan : Doesn't look V3.