Tendencies
As stated above, the main branching trait for a given language is just a tendency and it often shows exceptions. Spanish, for example, while overwhelmingly right-branching, puts numeral modifiers before nouns and, in certain cases, objects before verbs. Languages like English and German - though regarded as being right-branching because the main verbs precede direct objects - place adjectives and numerals before their nouns. Japanese and most other languages of northeastern Asia and the Indian subcontinent, on the other hand, are practically a model for rigidly left-branching languages. The Mon–Khmer and Austronesian languages of southeast Asia and many African languages come close to rigidly right-branching, with numerals as well as adjectives following their nouns and degree words like very, too, extremely, and quite following the adjectives they modify.
Read more about this topic: Branching (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the word tendencies:
“... the generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature.... He must have no idiosyncracies, no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to men.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)