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Research
In the early 1990's, Richard Kayne and Noam Chomsky proposed new theories of highly restrictive syntactic structure and word order variation. Previous theories accounted for word order variation by stating that all languages have very different syntactic structure. Kayne and Chomsky, on the other hand, suggest that all languages have very similar basic syntactic structure and that the differences in word order arise from transformations that reorder elements within a sentence. For example, Malagasy VOS could be accounted for the same way we account for the English sentence "(Alex wanted to hire Sandy) and hired him, she did!" Obviously Malagasy is the ideal language to study in order to determine whether these theories are tenable or not.
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