LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Grammatical Relation, Generative Grammar, Transitive Verb
Document Summary
If you have a language with a lot of morphological case marking, then it"s usually the case that you have a lot of freedom with word order. Like you could put your subject at the end of your sentence and no one will have trouble understanding it. Not perfect though -- asian languages tend to be neither one or the other (very morphological, or rigid order). You have to take into account how much the language depends on context. More context-dependent language: can indicate you have short sentences, and people will assume an unmarked set of consequences. Eg, hungry = i"m hungry = you don"t specify yourself, and it is the speaker talking. Geographically close countries tend to have similar languages: case. The typology is kind of all over the place. But you see that it"s not true that you have a lot of different cases.