🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <1993Jan21.052233.17711@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
> Breton has
> a very strange phonology, by the way, and, if I read correctly 
> between the lines of Pierre Trepoz's Grammaire Bretonne, stranger
> points of grammar: in certain types of phrases, you cannot distinguish
> between subject and object. The only other language I know of that
> does that, and is famous for it, is Lisu, spoken somwhere in Nepal,
> is memory serves..

I saw only this fragment from the original source, so I'm not precisely clear
on what data from Trepos you're referring to.  I should mention that Trepos is
considered notoriously unreliable by some Breton scholars.  Particularly in the
area of some of the word orders he gives.  I have studied Breton in the field,
and I have never been able to come up with good examples of the confusion.  You
have a potential for confusion in topicalized sentences and relative clauses,
but speakers almost always claim that the sentences with preposed objects are bad
in those cases.  Apparently the perceptual confusion influences what speakers
think of as being grammatical.  Although I don't have any hard data to support my
suspicions, I believe that object preposing is legal only in contexts where 
there can be no mistake that the NP in question is the direct object of the verb--
analogous to the "reversible" and "irreversible" passive cases that psycholinguists
talk about.

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Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@boeing.com)   Seattle, WA