> Can't even put the inflected pronoun first even though it would be unambiguous:
> Him Colonel Mustard killed.
You can do that. It's called fronting, and it's not rare in English.
It's not a case of the argument order being flexible, but what you said is just plain false.
> The only variation in your English examples is with the prepositions.
So?
> English is a language where you just do not get that kind of flexibility.
You mean the kind of flexibility I just illustrated? Or something else? You have a verb with 5 arguments. Two of them go in fixed locations. The other three don't go in fixed locations.
It's not a coincidence that the arguments that are free to wander around the sentence are the ones that bear explicit markings of the nature of their relationship to the verb.
> The dog the policeman bites.
> Stilted and prone to get misunderstood isn't it?
Not really. It's not a sentence, though; "the dog the policeman bites" is just a noun phrase referring to a dog. There's no verb. (Bites is a verb, but it's inside a relative clause.)
> Him Colonel Mustard killed.
You can do that. It's called fronting, and it's not rare in English.
It's not a case of the argument order being flexible, but what you said is just plain false.
> The only variation in your English examples is with the prepositions.
So?
> English is a language where you just do not get that kind of flexibility.
You mean the kind of flexibility I just illustrated? Or something else? You have a verb with 5 arguments. Two of them go in fixed locations. The other three don't go in fixed locations.
It's not a coincidence that the arguments that are free to wander around the sentence are the ones that bear explicit markings of the nature of their relationship to the verb.
> The dog the policeman bites.
> Stilted and prone to get misunderstood isn't it?
Not really. It's not a sentence, though; "the dog the policeman bites" is just a noun phrase referring to a dog. There's no verb. (Bites is a verb, but it's inside a relative clause.)