Abstract
Word orders are not distributed equally: SOV and SVO are the most prevalent among the world's languages. While there is a consensus that SOV might be the “default” order in human languages, the factors that trigger the preference for SVO are still a matter of debate. Here we provide a new perspective on word order preferences that emphasizes the role of a lexicon. We propose that while there is a tendency to favor SOV in the case of improvised communication, the exposure to a shared lexicon makes it possible to liberate sufficient cognitive resources to use syntax. Consequently SVO, the more efficient word order to express syntactic relations, emerges. To test this hypothesis, we taught Italian (SVO) and Persian (SOV) speakers a set of gestures and later asked them to describe simple events. Confirming our prediction, results showed that in both groups a consistent use of SVO emerged after acquiring a stable gesture repertoire.
Highlights
Even though there are six logically possible ways of arranging words into sentences according to their basic grammatical functions of Subject, Object, and Verb (SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV), the SOV and SVO orders account for 86% of word order variation among the world’s languages (Dryer, 2005)
We propose that in the above mentioned cases, there might be an additonal factor that could explain a switch of word order preferences from SOV to SVO: participants started to use a consistent lexicon in the gesturing of the events
We suggest that once there are enough cognitive resources to grammaticalize, there is a default tendency to do so, since grammaticalization enables the expression of more complex structures in a cognitively more economical way, without the need of using case marking3
Summary
Even though there are six logically possible ways of arranging words into sentences according to their basic grammatical functions of Subject, Object, and Verb (SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OVS, OSV), the SOV and SVO orders account for 86% of word order variation among the world’s languages (Dryer, 2005). The preferences for these two specific word orders suggest that the triggers for some word order regularities might be genetically endowed in our cognitive repertoire. While in the literature some people have proposed that SOV might be the order that emerged first in early human languages (Givón, 1979; Newmeyer, 2000; Gell-Mann and Ruhlen, 2011), and that there is evidence in many European languages for a unidirectional change from SOV to SVO (for an overview see Newmeyer, 2000), the source of the relative frequency of SVO in the current languages of the world is still a subject of a debate
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