Proto-Indo-European Syntax

[Journal of Indo-European Studies, Monograph 1]. Butte, Montana: Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology — 1975 — 78 pp.Introduction: The linear order of meaningful elements has long been a concern of Indo-Europeanists — of Delbrück and Watkins, for example, and of such theoretical linguists as Sapir and Ross. Recently, Lehmann has tried to relate Indo-European studies to modern syntax, particularly , to questions raised by Greenberg. Jri a series of courageous and well-documented articles (which, incidentally, stimulated the present statement) Lehmann argued that most of the ancients dialects and Proto-Indo-European itself were ‘OV’—a sort of short-hand term for an ideal syntactic type, Greenberg’s III, that includes object-verb order (OV), adjective and genitive before noun (AN, GN), standard-adjective order (SA), postpositions, and the preposing of relative clauses. All these are internally consistent or ‘harmonic’ in that they exemplify the deeper order of modifier-modified.