Xiii. Linguistics

The nature of the level of Deep Structure, or more generally, the question of abstractness in syntax, is now the subject of intense debate. See, for example, the theoretical discussion in Postal. This report is concerned with word order, in particular with the relative order of the major sentence constituents: Verb, Subject, and Object. In most analyses of English a base order has been (implicitly) assumed which more or less resembles Surface Structure order,2 as expressed in the following Phrase-Structure rules: S-NP VP (Adv place) (Advtime VP-Aux V (NP) (NP)(PP) (PP) (Advmanner manner When, however, we must determine the base order for a language in which surface word order is much freer than in English, we realize how little we actually know about the relation between the order of constituents in Deep Structure and Surface Structure .3 The little understood rule of Scrambling, characteristic of Latin, Sanscrit,