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)

(Unindenting) Ok, I understand the word "fahren" in German. I also know that it means to travel by car. I couldn't be able to read "Der Herr Der Ringe" without knowing that fact. Also, Japanese doesn't use "ikimasu" with "kuruma de". They use "unten shimasu." The point is not to produce the perfect sentence, it's to produce a sentence which demonstrates the property that you're seeking to show without inviting a bunch of other grammatical noise that confuses someone. BTW, "Ich habe gestern in die Niederanden gefahren, aber morgen fahre ich zum Geschäft." "Ich habe gestern in die Niederlanden, aber zum Geschäft fahre ich morgen." "Ich habe gestern mit dem LKW gefahren, aber mit dem Auto fahre ich morgen." The fact that you cannot recognize that these forms are grammatically valid without the context around them shows that you HAVE NOT STUDIED THE NECESSARY MATERIAL TO COMMENT.

The article word order covers this: "Sometimes patterns are more complex: German, and Dutch have SOV in subordinates, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO." Again... this states that the SUPERFICIAL word order of German is SVO.

Now, to comment that the vast majority of native speakers of German will disagree with the statement that German is V2-SOV, the vast majority of native English speakers also say that double negatives are logical positives, and should be avoided. That infinitives shouldn't be split, and that prepositions should never end a sentence. However, they neglect certain vital facts. Double negatives are common in other languages and in fact it's a matter of concordance, not logical negation. You can't say "I have any book." anymore than you can say "I have no book." (German says "Ich habe kein Buch" however, which is a common feature of SOV languages, in that languages tend to negate the first element in the generative grammar. In English, this is the verb. "I (don't have) any books." and German "Ich kein Buch habe" which is then adjusted to "Ich habe kein Buch". "Ich habe ein Buch nicht." sounds stupid.) The English infinitive is NOT "to be", it's simply "be". There are two words there, and like any other two words, words can be inserted between. Lastly, prepositions ending a sentence are a matter of Germanic grammars. We have preposition-containing verbs. "aufstehen" "stand up". "mitkommen" and "come with".

Finally, to make this clear to you. Just because you think you know how things work in your native language does not mean that you know what the real answer is. And just because schools teach it, doesn't mean that it's correct. --Puellanivis (talk) 04:57, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Obviously you are totaly missing the point here by saying "you HAVE NOT STUDIED THE NECESSARY MATERIAL TO COMMENT.". Fact is that a person like me who as you like to think shouldn't comment here because he does not know what he is talking about did infact improve your article and did make you comment on an older comment you did never really answer to. And let me add I am still not satisfied by your work here. I did (now) write to some wiki and university people and some say in their opinion the word "fundamentally" itself is sloppy due to its unspecific nature. German is by conventional language typology as the german wiki says a SPO-V2 language and (only) by Generative grammar(Added due to my comment!) a SOV language. Now the second time I remind you that I am a user of this encyclopedia and that you neither provided resources (web links) nor wiki links (like v) or explanations , you said "fundamentally" so that everyone should assume it is like this. Guess what the germans who read it do not ...

I really hate to be that personal and agressiv but you seem to think that other people are not allowed to talk about a subject you studied and assume something because no resources are given to think otherwise.And your comments did not help much either (most likely because you didn't care much).It took little to no effort explaining it to me in a normal way and by pointing to chomsky. If I build a motorcycle and do not tell you how to ride it its a given that I will get a lot of dumb people bugging me that this thing that looks like a bicycle does not handle like one. And to make it clear to you. Just because you see something as given or right does not make it so either.

About the verbs: You misunderstood my comment. I did infact see that they are correct which is not that big of a problem for a nativ speaker (as said "Doesn't matter much here!"). It was a comment that was aimed to make it clear to you. As a simple help. But for later people your edit might be better anyway.

I want to say it again: Still my deepest regards for working here! But you should not focus on being seen superior. You tried "to get" me through errors I made because I didn't see what you meant by "fundamentally SOV" and 'cause I do not know all about linguistics. Instead of talking about your degree or unrelated errors a link would have helped much more.

You are allowed to delete the who conversation if you do provide more links in your article.Otherwise please let this little flamy conversation stay so people know about the links and that the discussion was done before. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.192.229.112 (talk) 15:30, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Your assumption here is that I am not German. In fact, I'm a Bayerin... Look, I'm not talking out of my butt here, and your statement that Germans would disagree with my statement is baseless, and wrong... since I _AM_ a German. So, please, stop using your common knowledge assumptions to argue with me. You're working with appeals to authority, that native German speakers won't agree, and that German schools teach differently. I pointed out that both of these arguments fail, because... *gasp* common knowledge assumptions are almost universally proven to be wrong in science. There's a reason why we have Physics labs, so that people can understand how their assumptions of how things will happen are actually wrong. Stating what my degree here is of absolutely no use... if you recall, a prominent wikipedia admin was exposed as having lied about having a Ph.D. so, it's not hard at all for me to say "I have a Ph.D. in linguistics", but that's just an appeal to authority. It's saying "listen to me because I actually have authority", no. Listen to me because what I'm saying makes logical sense. Don't tell me "but it must be SVO because that's what I learned!" No. Present an argument as to why your statement is correct. If German is SVO then provide me proof... and more specifically provide me proof that SVO explains everything better than V2-SOV. The only thing I need point to is the V2 word order article. I don't need to provide references here, because this article is not concerned with explaining German word-order, but merely presenting that German is TMP. As an academic aside it's mentioned that German is TMP likely because it's V2-SOV. --Puellanivis (talk) 00:36, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Well let me write here a last time because I really don't like to discuss with people who can not overcome their own barrier of personality. And I think you have most of the issues there.

You are not German... And to be direct saying that is ridicules after the errors you made. I don't even know why you try to defend this as I DO NOT CARE (and told you TWICE now) about it the least bit. If you are an American you could still write correct stuff. And you even did that here. HOWEVER you packed it so wrong and tried to argue so bad against SVO that this disscussion and your article did not provide useful information. Also your profile says you are nativ english speaker ^^.

Really my biggest problem w. the article is that you use the word fundamentally ... as a linguist and do not even consider changing it to a more appropriate explanation of what you want to say to everybody. Instead w. this choice of words you confuse people who than need to comment here. And since you do not provide ref. nor consider doing so it is in fact your bad choice of words that do make this article a concern of "German word-order" (and let me add: I did not even open this topic!). So what I wanted you to do after I understood your point of view was either change your choice of words or provide links to what you think is "fundamentally SOV" and where the choice of words comes from. As I said you are not only writing for linguists (which disagree with fundamentally to btw ^^) but for normal people here as well and should provide as much resources or references as you can for them in order to understand what you are saying in this article.

And from your post above I can see that you are so concerned defending yourself against what you may think is an attack against what PhD you have or not have that you over read all I tried to say about the article and your point of view. Its really not about your PhD here. And I could provide a ton of resources that say SVO over SOV but as you might have noticed this is since the last post of me no longer topic here as both are correct to me. If they are not to you than maybe you should read about why German is often classified as SVO and that maybe Chomsky is not everything ?

As an attack to your knowledge I say this: In my personal opinion you did most likely add 1 to every language you "speak". Why ? Because you think by knowing grammar you can easily read and write stuff by taking an sentence, changing the grammar and translating the vocabulary. Than you have some trouble with verbs but you can work that out in the end as well and computers help you with the character writing issue. But as I tried to tell you I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU ! Especially not if I already talked to people w. the same degree you have and they did explain a lot better what the diff. between saying "German is SOV-V2" or "German is SVO-V2" is. And that both are correct if you know from where you analyze top or bottom ,historical (surface) or Chomsky point or view and that you can't consider any of em wrong or right.

My point is your choice of words and that you do not help people with it. GERMAN IS NOT FUNDAMENTALY SOV it is if using genitive grammar but German itself is not made out of genitiv grammar by normal use. Therefore German is in fact SVO in most used cases and can be classified so! "It is common among languages with SOV generative grammars. Japanese (which is SOV) and German (which is fundamentally SOV but uses V2 in certain circumstances, especially main clauses) belong to this category. " could easyly be "It is common among languages with SOV Generative grammars. As such Japanese and German belong to this category. " or even "It is common among languages with SOV Generative grammars. As such Japanese and German (SVO in most main clauses) belong to this category. ". And this is even downsizing bwt - and it still would help - think what an explanation would do. And let me say it again; The V2 article does not do a good job as well.79.192.206.229 (talk) 05:01, 4 January 2009 (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)

Incorrect translation of French

The translation of "Demain je vais en auto au magasin." is incorrect. au is translated merely to to. Au is infact a contraction of à and le, the latter being an equivalent to the. I therefore say the translation should be changed to

Tomorrow I go in car to the shop.

/Tense (talk) 18:41, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Place-manner-time

Removed an unsourced reference to "place-manner-time" order in English, which was original research and is contradicted by numerous English grammar sources stating that manner-place-time is the preferred order in that language. Krychek (talk) 19:02, 5 June 2014 (UTC)