ON THE RELATION BETWEEN THE WEAK SEMANTICS OF VERBS AND THE TENDENCY TO VS ORDER. (Sur le rapport entre la faiblesse sémantique du verbe et lordre vs)

From time to time, attempts have been made to question the assumption regarding the relation between the weak semantics of verbs and the tendency to VS order. In the paper, such an attempt was presented and rejected on the basis of two kinds of argument. First, there are strong communicative reasons to believe in the obligatory or almost obligatory existence (even in languages showing strong tendency to analytism and, as a result of this, to rigid word order SV), of existential constructions of the type 'existential verb or there be + Subject' (e.g. It. Esistono enunciati tetici, Eng. There are many trials in this life). Secondly, a table taken from a variety of texts in typologicaly differentiated languages provides numerical data regarding the number of occurrences of verbs belonging to some meaning-classes in SV and VS orders.