현대몽골어의 어순에 관한 연구

Abstract

Grammatical relations among syntactic units can be coded by means of word order. It is a well-known fact that being a non-inflectional language, Mongolian relies heavily, if not totally, upon word order in its grammatical system. The phenomenon of free word order has been considered a well-known characteristics of Mongolian. NP's with grammatical functions such as a subject or an object can be freely reordered. Along with free word order, the existence of fixed word order in some constructions has been recognized. However, no serious attempt has been made to find out the basic unmarked word order in Mongolian. In previous studies, it has often been the case that the phenomenon of free word order has been discussed, either almost ignoring the existence of fixed word order or treating it with minimal emphasis. In this paper we have attempted to provide a systematic analysis of the free word order. The claim is that Modern Mongolian should be underlyingly a SOV language. Verb-finality and coherency between O and V constitute valid ground for the substantiation of our claim. NPs that are specific or definite NPs are subject to scrambling while non-specific NPs are not allowed to scramble. All specific or definite NPs are obligatorily accusative Case-marked, that is accusative case marking is sufficient condition for an NP to be interpreted a specific or definite.