This paper focuses on a curious fact about the distribution of particles, namely that these elements quite systematically fail to behave in accordance with otherwise robustly substantiated word-order generalisations. Thus for example, Greenberg (1963) famously excluded “uninflected auxiliaries” from his discussion of auxiliary placement relative to the verb and object, basing his now-famous Universal 16, regarding the tendency for V, O and Aux placement to be “harmonic” (i.e. either AuxVO or OVAux, or consistently head-initial or head-final), exclusively on the behaviour of inflected auxiliaries of the type familiar from Indo-European.  Similarly, particles systematically violate a word-order constraint that otherwise appears to hold universally in the domain of “disharmonic” languages, the so-called Final-over-Final Constraint/FOFC given in (1):

(1) The Final-Over-Final Constraint/FOFC      (cf. Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2007)
If α is a head-initial phrase and β is a categorially non-distinct* phrase immediately dominating α, then β must be head-initial. If α is a categorially non-distinct head-final phrase, and β is a phrase immediately dominating α, then β can be head-initial or headfinal.
[* ‘categorial non-distinctness’ being speculatively defined with reference to a head’s ‘verbal’ [+V] versus ‘nominal’ [+N] specification]

Among many other cases, (1), for example, captures the oft-noted VOAux gap in Germanic (cf. i.a. den Besten 1989, Kiparsky 1996), which contrasts with the ready attestation of AuxOV orders in this family. Holmberg (2000) shows that the same gap appears in Finnish and Haddican (2004) registers the corresponding gap in Basque. Similarly, it is well-established that VO languages do not feature final complementisers (cf. Hawkins 1990), whereas OV languages rather commonly have initial complementisers (cf. West Germanic, Turkish, etc.). VOAux and VOC patterns do not seem to universally ruled out, however: a range of VO languages with non-inflecting auxiliaries, generally labelled particles in grammars, permit the former pattern, while VO languages featuring clause-final discourse particles would seem to instantiate the latter (cf. Chinese and Northern Italians dialects). Beyond the realm of tense/aspect and discourse particles, we also find problematic final nominal particles (e.g. in Welsh and various Creoles) and circumpositional structures in which final postpositional elements can clearly be shown to structurally dominate initial prepositional phrases (e.g. in German, Afrikaans and various Ethiopian and Iranian varieties).
The aim of this paper is, firstly, to present a range of structures featuring "outlier" particles, and, secondly, to argue that there may be something to Greenberg’s intuition that particles are in some crucial sense “different”, and therefore potentially not fatal to (1) or to word-order generalisations more generally.

References

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