A Typological Study of Lower Sorbian and Breton Word Order

Abstract

In the case of Breton, lots of attempts were made to determine its historically grown word order. Proposals in this regard range from VSO (Timm) over V2 (Schafer) to SVO (Varin). This paper shows that traditional Breton has a preference for V2 positioning within a VSO-type framework. Lower Sorbian is a language with a rich morphology and consequently shows a relatively flexible word order. However, in unmarked declarative sentences it is normally the subject which occurs in sentence-initial position whereas the verb does not seem to prefer any specific position. Having determined the word order in the traditional varieties of Breton and Lower Sorbian, an outlook will be given on potential changes of their actual word order under language contact.