Dravidian syntactic typology: A reply to steever

Part of this reply to Steever's ''What's so subversive...'' is to correct misinterpretations and misrepresentations of my earlier work in that paper, to clarify some of my ideas, and to correct certain mistakes on my part. More important are two other parts. One of these demonstrates that, pace Steever, relative-correlatives with finite predicates in the relative clause but no post- RC clitic must be admitted for the oldest attestations of Dravidian, the geographically northern languages, Koraga, and (optionally) Modern Malayalam. Post-RC clitics, thus, are a southern Dravidian innovation which crosses genetic subgroups. Further consequences of this finding are discussed. Secondly, I map out areas where I believe neither Steever's account nor mine has yielded adequate insights and where further research is needed. These areas include sentence or clause conjunction and the issue of multiple finite verbs, the regional distribution of Quotatives vs. Quotativals in Dravidian, the prehistory of Dravidian relative-correlatives, and the classification of Koraga within the Dravidian family.