This paper aims to investigate the diachronic aspects of the IE syntax, dealing chiefly with the word-order phenomena from the viewpoint of Greenberg's“basic order typology”. According to their basic order types, the IE languages may roughly be divided into two major groups: 1) the Eastern or Asian group which is characterized by the (S) OV type and 2) the Western or European group which comprises three subgroups, namely, the North group (Germanic, Slavic and Lithuanian) = the inconsistent SVO type, the South group (Romance languages, Albanian and Modern Greek)=the consistent SVO type and the West or Celtic group = the consistent VSO type. But the differences of this kind become less clear when we go back to the earlier period, for the VO characteristics of the European languages are mostly of relatively late origin.
In the old IE languages, we only find either the consistent or the inconsistent OV type; Hittite, Luwian, Tocharian and Old Indic belong to the former type, whereas Old Iranian, Italic, Old Greek and Old Armenian belong to the latter, which can be characterized by the tendency of the increasing use of “prepositions” accompanied by the noun-genitive ordering and the relative indeterminacy of the verb position. Such are the situations of the earliest attested stage of IE, but the original order type of PIE is to be considered as of OV type, such as found in the Uralic and Altaic languages.
As to the causes of the syntactic or word-order change of IE, various factors must be taken into consideration. Apart from the external causes, such as the influence of language contact, which should not be neglected, the most important internal factors are, it seems, to be sought in the morphological structures of PIE.
First, the IE nominal declension or case-system, one of the most characteristic features of the OV language, suffers a grave functional deficiency, i.e. the lack of the monofunctional case-markers. This structural defectleads to the gradual decay of the IE case-system, accompanied by the development of prepositions or postpositions which replace more and more the weakened and ambivalent endings and thus function as new monofunctional case-markers.But the more fundamental and direct factor effecting the word-order change seems to lie in the verbal conjugation or the status of “finite verb” of PIE. In the languages of the strict or “rigid” OV type, such as Japanese or Mongolian, the “finite (or predicate) verb” is nothing but the verbal form which closes or finishes the sentence, so that it is always bound to the end of the sentence and thus can never be removed from its own position. On the other hand, the finite verb of PIE, and also of the Uralic languages, is characterized by the “personal ending” affixed closely to the verbal stem, which also functions as word-final marker and thus secures its autonomy and independence from the sentence-final position. This autonomy of the finite verb, established by the personal conjugation, gives the possibility of “free verb order” attested in many of the early IE languages and also in the modern Uralic languages such as Hungarian.
The verbal conjugation marked by the personal endings can be found only in its beginning in the Altaic languages (Turkic and Tungus) but in its full development in the Uralic languages and also in PIE. Thus, as regards the autonomy of the finite verb, the Eurasian languages seem to form a continuous scale rising gradually from East to West.
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