Talk:Time–manner–place

Bad example ?

Ich fahre heute mit dem Auto nach München. Is not a SOV but a SVO sentence. A bad example for what you want to show ... 79.192.228.70 (talk) 21:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

German is not an SOV language.

For more information, follow the link for linguistic typology...

72.131.73.123 (talk) 05:07, 10 January 2008 (UTC)Richard O. 01/09/08

Followed that link and found this text:

German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" or, "I say something about Karl", is in SVO word order. When a conjuction like "dass", which corresponds to "that" in English, is used; the verb appears at the end of the sentence, rendering the word order SOV. A possible such sentence is "Ich sage, dass Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat", or, translated into English word-for-word, "I say that Karl a belt bought has", hence, SOV word order. (emphasis mine)

German is a V2 word order otherwise SOV language. --Puellanivis (talk) 08:01, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

No it is NOT. German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. So please don't say something like that. Most of the time (we) use SVO! I know some Japanese and that is not the same thing mate ... 79.192.228.70 (talk) 21:31, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

*sigh* No, German and Dutch are V2 word orders... SVO does not address anything of them properly except the simplest of sentences. If a language fails to fulfill the requirements of a group defined by a property, then it does not belong to that group. In any case, I have listed the occurrence being in "languages with SOV generative grammars". Being as that's what you're insisting that it is. German is still not SVO... SVO implies that if you move a adpositional phrase to the beginning of the sentence, that the subject remains before the verb. Examples: "Demain je vais au magasin." and "Tomorrow, I'm going to the store." This conflicts against German and Dutch grammars: "Morgen fahre ich nach Geschäft.", and "Morgen ga ik naar de winkel." That is how V2 languages work. Again, German and Dutch are called SVO by only the simplest of classifications... the same ones that would assign Japanese and Chinese together as related languages. --Puellanivis (talk) 05:37, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

"Morgen fahre ich zum Geschäft." (TMP)(VSO) is a perfectly valid sentince. As well as "Zum Geschäft fahre ich morgen." (PMT)(OVS) and "Ich fahre Morgen zum Geschäft." (MTP)(SVO) and even "Ich sage, dass ich morgen zum Geschäft fahre." (TPM)(SOV). Now the problem is not what german can or can't do or even how it is classified. It is that: 1. You try to do a TMP example which in german with SOV is not even possible and 2. that SOV is only used in dependent clauses. Please don't use german as an example here because it is just not a very good one (to prove SOV leads to TMP - since german is not SOV and the example is not SOV) and misleading. And let me add. The other wiki articles who say "German is SOV" are wrong as well. Anyway, compliment for working here!79.192.228.74 (talk) 00:31, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

No, "Zum Geschäft fahre ich morgen." is not PMT, or OVS. "Zum Geschäft" is an adpositional phrase, NOT the object. While one can make a superficially OVS sentence in German "Den Ball habe ich." that does NOT make it OVS, surprisingly raw SVO ordering is boring, and monotonous in German. Now, to point that "Zum Geschäft fahre ich morgen" is not PMT, "Zum Geschäft fahre ich morgen mit dem Auto." would be superficially PTM. Since you wanted to point me to the German article about it (btw, YES, I do speak German... very well thank you.) "Im Deutschen tritt SOV in Nebensätzen auf („Als Peter den Apfel aß, …“)."

To the point that a SOV TMP phrase is "impossible", I present: "Als ich gestern mit dem Auto zum Geschäft fahrte, ..." The difference between a dependent and independent clause, as noted by the V2 Word order article, points out that the complementiser is always in the second position (this marks the first position as the topic of the phrase). In the case of an independent clause the complementiser is empty, and thus the first verb is moved into that position (again, in order to mark the topic of the phrase) however in the case of a dependent clause the complementiser is already filled by the conjunction, and thus the verb doesn't move from it's STANDARD position, of being last. (Alternatively, dependent clauses cannot have topics, see: Japanese grammar, and thus no movement of a verb is possible in order to mark a topic in such a sentence.)

Now, let's go over the properties of SOV languages from the German SOV article: "SOV-Sprachen setzen in den meisten Fällen Adjektive vor das Nomen, benutzen Postpositionen eher als Präpositionen, setzen Relativsätze vor das Substantiv, auf das sie sich beziehen, und setzen Hilfsverben hinter das Tätigkeitsverb. Sie tendieren zur Reihenfolge Zeit – Art und Weise – Ort in Präpositionalsätzen. Einige besitzen auch besondere Partikel, um Subjekt und Objekt zu markieren, unter anderem Japanisch und Koreanisch." Let's inventory German, Japanese, English, and French for this purpose.

• German: adjectives fall before the noun (der rote Ball), Japanese: before (akai borru), English: before (the red ball), French: after (la balle rouge)
• German: Relative phrases are put before the noun (die Mann sehende Frau), Japanese: before (otoko o mitte no onna), English: after (the woman who sees the man), French: after (la femme qui voit le homme);
• German: auxilary verbs occur after the main verb: (ich sage dass ich es machen kann. alternative: "ich könnte es sehen müssen"), Japanese: after (sore o shite koto ga dekimasu), English: before (I can do it), French: before (je puex le faire)
• German: Time-Manner-Place (ich gehe morgen mit dem Auto zum Geschäft), Japanese: TMP (ashita kuruma de stoa ni ikimasu), English: PMT (I'm going to the store with my car tomorrow), French: PMT (je vais au magasin en auto demain)

To point out as well from the V2 word order discussion, linguists have READILY and HANDILY proven that the regular German plural is "-s", (Johan Schmidt -> die Schmidts, not "die Schmidte" not "die Schmidten" not "die Schmidt" not "die Schmidter". As well, invent a word, it has the plural "-s".) However, being a German speaker, you will readily agree, that this is the single most uncommon plural in German. Can 95% of German words have irregular plurals? It turns out, YES. Can the most common word order for German be SVO, yet still be irregular? YES. While word order is stated to be flexible in both German and Japanese, it turns out, only SPECIFIC parts are flexible. In German, only the first position is flexible. In Japanese, only the first position is flexible if it is the topic. "watashi wa ashita kuruma de stoa ni ikimasu" -> "ashita kuruma de stoa ni ikimasu" -> "kuruma dewa ashita stoa ni ikimasu" -> "stoa niwa ashita kuruma de ikimasu." cf. "Ich gehe morgen mit dem Auto zum Geschäft" -> "Morgen gehe ich mit dem Auto zum Geschäft" -> "Mit dem Auto gehe ich morgen zum Geschäft" -> "Zum Geschäft gehe ich morgen mit dem Auto". Note that all of these German sentences look weird trying to fit them into an {S, V, O} taxonomy, and that's why it's called "V2". However, if you assume that the verb was moved up to the second position for some grammatical reason, you have every single one of them conform to the same format that Japanese uses... S... O... V.

Now, being that I am a linguist, and various other linguists that actually study German have commented that German is V2-SOV in structure (for a V2-SVO see the Scandanavian languages) you are out of place and against consensus of the linguistics community. Please provide empirical evidence to support your claim. --Puellanivis (talk) 01:59, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I did make a mistake there (I didn't take my time there). Most of what you said was interresting to me but not to the discussion. First of all, you yourself said that it is a V2 language that can and does use more than one sentence structure. Yet in this article you say "which is fundamentally SOV". Now why do you try to tag this onto german. I find no resources AT ALL to validate this claim ! The only thing I see is a lonely V2 wiki site and this one that claims so (and from a look into its comments is not very good with german). All I can find are resources that say "It is a V2 language and uses SVO in main and SOV in dependent clauses" (http://ling.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Korean/Dt-SOV/). So again I ask you why do you claim V2-"SOV" if it is very clear to your linguistic community that SOV does not have more significance (maybe less !) as SVO in german. Now http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satzstellung clearly says "German is a SPO language with V2 order. While P in most cases is a verb.". Don't you think its a little strange that this is what every german would say as well as learn in school (university) yet its totaly wrong ? If you do pease talk to these people on the discussion page. Write your text in english if its easier. But I REALLY don't see your claim validated. What you said would sound wierd "Ich [fahre] morgen mit dem Auto zum Geschäft" is the one sentence that would be most common as a main clauses.

I will not say much about your "plural -s" comment since it will lead to far away but you may want to look into this article. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural It states that -s is very often used in certain cases wich mostly developed kinda post war ... So my guess is that its a englsh influence. And trust me there's a big discussion about that anyway ;)

Since you said something about yourself let me say something about myself :) I am no linguist also I find it very interresting and have good connections to some of their profs (I am not even a good speller (Dyslexia) :D). However I hope you can provide me and your article (as well as the V2 and SOV one) a good resource base. I have no problem at all if it turns out I am wrong. But if I am you en.wiki people did a bad job in validating your work and helping me to understand it. But as I said I have NEVER heard that german is SOV more than it is SVO and have found only resources to support otherwise. And even the english wiki states "German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar" (which I quoted before).

And still I say "Since your initial text trys to prove a conncetion between SOV and TMP you can find way better exsamples ...". Still my deepest regards ! (as a hint: You are not good with verbs :D (Doesn't matter much here!)) 79.192.227.92 (talk) 04:28, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Something unrelated to "German is not an SOV"

Apologies if I have filled this page in wrong, I don't entirely understand the instructions for doing so. What I wanted to say is that Hammer's German Grammar and Usage (Second Edition) Chapter 18, section 1 together with p. 477 disputes that German is a time manner place language. It says that true adverbials typically come in the order time, place, manner in German sentences, and that the place element at the end (for example in the sentence ich fahhre heute mit dem Auto in Muenchen) is actually usually a complement to the verb, not an adverbial. However, it does acknowledge that many "handbooks" do say that it is a time manner place language.

212.42.169.50 (talk) 13:36, 26 February 2008 (UTC)