bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Oct 04, 2021 2:05 am
The structural changes are exactly what I’m trying to figure out. Aside from wanting to go from SVO to SOV, all I know so far is that the language turns its SVCs into compound verbs, and loses most 2P clitics.
The only language I know of that does this (and still has serial verbs) is Japanese, which already has the verb at about the position you want it. I think one of the biggest reasons Japanese would be resistant to changing to, say, V2, is that placing a verb before a nominal effectively turns the verb-nominal sequence into a relative clause (adjectives also work this way):
雨は冷たい
Ame wa tsumetai "The rain is cold"
冷たい雨
Tsumetai ame "Cold rain"
人が走ってる
Hito ga hashitteru "The person is running"
走る人
Hashiru hito "A person who runs"
If you end up with this pattern, there's a chance that, if the verb already can optionally come after the nominals but this is a marked form, having this very common adnominal marker sound like some other conjugated form (or have your relative clause markers erode with the second-person clitics, so you end up with ambiguous adnominality) will likely push the verb to be somewhere that there won't be any ambiguity about what it's doing. You could speed this along further by having common structure verbs erode into case particles in some contexts (Japanese also did this,
-ni,
-nite/-de, and
-no were probably all originally verbs themselves), such that you have to switch the order to from
this is that to
this that is in order not to have ambiguity with such a structure as
this of that,
this with that. Since clitics are eroding, I expect other words must be, too, so some new case markers sound likely to form.
I wish I could tell you all this
precipitated the change in Japonic, but Old Japanese was already subject-object-verb, as far as I'm aware. (It's also an extremely resilient feature once you have it — Ineshîmé, having a longer time depth than Old Japanese to modern in its setting, didn't dis-evolve it, but Japonic syntax seems to tend towards conservatism, in my experience.)
More hypothetically, it could also be that clauses could originally only tolerate either a main verb or serial verbs, and the development of verbs into markers did not result in a new slot for verbs within a noun phrase, so that your
this-with-that structure, with the
with word being formerly a verb, cannot be split (if I recall correctly, the "rule" against splitting infinitives in English was once actually descriptively correct — it seems to have at least been
uncommon before sometime in the Eighteenth Century, when people started worrying about it — so if you have this noun-marker-noun structure require the verb come after, the verb could possibly fossilise into this position, especially if verbs tend to be big snarls of affixes).
As far as serial verbs becoming compound verbs, Japanese also seems to have done that historically through attaching a stem called the
ren'yōkei, which usually ends in
-i, but in some verbs
-e to whatever other form, e.g. 走り回る
hashirimawaru "run around", where the
hashiri- is the ren'yōkei of 走る
hashiru "run, drive, travel", and appended to it is the further conjugable 回る
mawaru "turn, revolve"; verbs could formerly, and in poetry sometimes still, use the ren'yōkei in place of the te-form to mean "do something and something else" (most of the fossilised forms mean something slightly different from their components nowadays).
I hope at least some of this is helpful (I'm starting to feel it's getting a bit rambly). There's also the possibility of having that structure simply common in surrounding language. Areal features are well-documented, and don't tend to require internal justification.