Word order optionality in question formation in Chinese copula clauses

This paper examines whether active sentences with different accusative markers illustrate identical circumstances when processing canonical ordered sentences and scramble ordered sentences. Specifically, this study focuses on Double Object Markers (DOM) phenomenon in Sinhala language with relation to sentence processing. Sinhala language is said to possess DOM for active sentences consisting of transitive verbs (/ta/ and /va/). Previous studies in experimental linguistics in Sinhala language have examined the canonical word order in active sentences consisting of transitive verbs with /ta/ accusatives, and have provided evidence that the canonical word order is decided based on the information provided by grammatical functions (Subject-Object-Verb). Since /va/ and /ta/ accusatives accompany different verbs, it is important to examine the sentences with /va/ accusatives in order to ascertain the fact that the canonical word order is constructed according to the grammatical information (i.e., Subject-Object-Verb) in all active sentences consisting of transitive verbs in the spoken form of the Sinhala language. Thus, this study conducted two experiments (EX#1 with /va/ accusatives, and EX#2 with /ta/ accusatives) using the nature of scrambling effects to seek whether SOV word order remains canonical and grammatical functions still provide necessary information to determine the canonical word order. A series of one-way ANOVAs was conducted on reaction times and error rates of the responses. The results show that the canonical order remains Subject-Object-Verb for active sentences consisting of transitive verbs with /va/ accusatives which in turn suggest that the information of grammatical function is still applicable regardless of different accusative types in active sentences of the Sinhala language.Key words - /ta/ Accusatives, /va/ Accusatives, Scrambling effects, Canonical order, Scrambled order

This article explores the interconnection between grammar and the performance of preferred and dispreferred responses in Japanese. As is well known, dispreferred format turns are structurally more complex than preferred format turns, regularly delayed, accompanied by prefaces and accounts, mitigated, or made indirect. Owing to the flexibility of Japanese grammar, participants have expanded intra-turn capacity to maximize or minimize compliance with such formats. On one extreme, a dispreferred action can be massively delayed until near the turn-ending through opting for so-called canonical predicate-final word order and minimization of ellipsis. On the other extreme, a preferred action can be expedited to the very opening of a turn through non-canonical predicate-initial word order by taking advantage of word order variability and ellipsis. Such syntactic practices are interactionally managed for calibrating the timing of social action. It emerges that the canonical word order – assumed to be the generically unmarked alternative – is actually optimally tailored for the implementation of marked (dispreferred) responses, as opposed to a non-canonical word order for unmarked (preferred) responses, in the given sequential environment.

Syntactic complexity and ambiguity resolution in a free word order language: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidences from Basque

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Learners can go a long way in making themselves understood by mapping conceptual arguments such as agent, event and patient straight onto canonical word order. However, in order to optimise communicative intentions they need to go beyond it. We will discuss such notions as canonical order, functional assignment and marked word orders within the framework of Processability Theory. This SLA theory seems particularly suited to do so, having recently expanded its scope by adding a discourse-pragmatically motivated syntactic component to the original morpho-syntactic one. We take Italian as an example, a head-marking, pro-drop language located towards the less configurational end of the typological spectrum, characterised by a rich morphology and a flexible syntax which is highly sensitive to pragmatic and discourse choices. For these typological characteristics Italian is well suited for testing how learners acquire the skills to free up the rigidity of canonical order, and learn to add their own perspective and emphases to the propositional content in order to guide the listener’s attention, e.g., by topicalising and focalising different elements of their message in an unequivocal (that is, grammatically accurate) manner.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the putative N‐intervening word order among Numeral (Num), Classifier (Clf), and Noun (N), that is, [Clf N Num], where the numeral is the indigenous one, found in 16 Asian languages, 15 Tai‐Kadai and one Austroasiatic, whose canonical word order is otherwise [Num Clf N]. This peculiar word order violates Greenberg's Universal 20A, that is, Num and Clf must be adjacent. Thus, the two N‐intervening orders, [Clf N Num] and [Num N Clf], are allegedly ill‐formed among the six mathematically possible word orders. A proposed explicit account for this N‐intervening construction in Maonan (Tai‐Kadai) argued that the putative numeral one is, in fact, a grammaticalized indefinite article instead, like a/an in English. The putative [Clf N Num] construction is thus [Clf N a/an]. The goal of this study is to examine the relevant data from the other 15 languages with the same putative violation to Universal 20A comprehensively and extend this indefinite article account to resolve all such putative violations. We then demonstrate that in Tai‐Kadai languages with [N Num Clf] as the canonical order, the indigenous numeral one has likewise been grammaticalized as an indefinite article in the [N Clf a/an] construction. Universal 20A is thus intact.

Word order types constitute the most well- established and frequently cited generalization in language typology. Basic or canonical word order tends to fall into two main types: SOV (about 48% of world languages) or SVO (about 41%). SOV is assumed to have been the predominant and unmarked word order in most of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, as well as in Iranian languages. This paper investigates the basic word order in Shabaki, a modern northwest language of the Indo-Iranian family spoken by the Shabaki minority in Iraq. This study also measures the word order variation and provides a typological description of this language. An examination of Shabaki data reveals that it follows SOV, OSV, SVO, VSO, OVS, and VOS word order patterns in mono-transitive sentences. The most frequent (predominant and unmarked) word order in declarative sentences in Shabaki is SOV where the initial position is occupied by a nominative noun phrase, but constituents can appear at any position, creating grammatical sentences with different discursive distributions. In ditransitive sentences, (S) DO V IO is proven to be three fold higher in number than (S) IO V DO. (S) DO IO V and (S) IO DO V were also found in data. Keywords: Agreement, basic word order, case, clitics, Indo-Iranian languages, language typology, Shabaki Introduction Grammatical relations in human languages, such as those between a noun phrase and the verb, are primarily expressed by means of three different morphosyntactic strategies: word order, case marking, and agreement (Croft 1990: 101). All languages, rather than relying on just one of these mechanisms, use some combination of the three. In this paper, it is the intention to explore what elements of these three strategies Shabaki language employs to indicate the relationship that a noun bears to the verb in a clause. It also tries to explore the order of objects in ditransitive sentences.

Effects of case marking and word order on syntactic parsing in Finnish were examined by registering readers’ eye fixation patterns while they read single sentences for comprehension. Target nouns appearing towards the beginning of the sentence took one of three grammatical roles: subject, object, or adverbial. The subject phrase in the sentence-initial position is the canonical order in Finnish, but the two other word orders are less frequent. In one experimental condition, the grammatical role of the target noun was signalled by a case inflection attached to the preceding adjective modifier; in the second condition this was not the case. The results showed a facilitation effect in sentence parsing due to case marking. Similarly, there was an effect of word order, where the canonical SVO order was associated with greater processing ease than were non-canonical word orders. The two factors interacted so that there was no effect of case marking for the SVO order, but a significant case marking effect for the two marked word orders. The same pattern of results showed up as both immediate and delayed effects. The results speak against the notion of head licensing proposed by Abney (1989) and Prichett (1991).

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.1

Syntactic properties such as word orders are a major factor determining the difficulty of a sentence. In SO-type languages where the subject (S) precedes the object (O) in canonical word order, there is clear evidence that the SO word order is preferred over the OS word order. We investigate to what extent this SO bias is maintained even in typologically diverse languages like Truku, an Austronesian language, in which the Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) word order is canonical and a syntactically basic structure, and SVO is the derived word order and a syntactically more complex structure. It is important to investigate word order preferences in Truku because such inquiries allow us to determine to what extent these widely observed processing preferences are grounded in properties of the linguistic system and/or somewhat more general human cognitive properties. The syntactic complexity account predicts that, in Truku, the derived SVO word order should be more costly, while the saliency account predicts that the word orders in which an agent precedes a theme is preferred. Our auditory comprehension experiment showed that the OS word order was preferred by native speakers of Truku. This indicates that the often-observed SO preference is not a universal feature of language. Furthermore, the lack of a clear indication of the agent-before-theme preference suggests a correlation between the voice property of a given language and the importance of the saliency factor.

The typology of word order in Hindi (Subject-Object-Verb, SOV) differs from that of English (Subject-Verb-Object, SVO). Bilinguals whose two languages have conflicting word order provide a unique opportunity to understand how word order affects language processing. Earlier behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies with Spanish-Basque bilinguals showed longer reading times and more errors in the comprehension of OSV sentences than SOV sentences in Basque language, indicating that non-canonical word orders (OSV) were difficult to process than canonical word order (SOV). This study was designed to explore how the difference in word order in Hindi and English languages affects N400 parameters in proficient Hindi-English bilinguals, using semantic congruity paradigm. Twenty-five proficient Hindi-English bilingual subjects were asked to silently read the congruent and incongruent sentences presented in one word at a time in both the languages. ERPs were recorded from midline frontal, central and parietal sites. The mean amplitude of the N400 effect at the parietal sites in Hindi-English proficient bilinguals was larger for English than for Hindi but there was no significant difference in the N400 latencies. Hindi-English bilingual subjects processed SOV and SVO sentences with equal ease as evidenced by the N400 latencies. Higher amplitude of the N400 effect with English sentences indicate that placing 'Object' as the final word makes sentences more predictable than verb as the final word. Understanding the word order difference might help to unravel the neurophysiological mechanisms of language comprehension and may offer some insights in terms of functional advantage of a particular word order in bilinguals.

Aim 1 of this study was to examine the developmental changes in typically developing English-speaking children's syntactically based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order. Aim 2 was to determine the psychometric standing of the novel sentence interpretation task developed for this study, because we wish to use it later with children with specific language impairment. Children listened to semantically implausible sentences in which noun animacy and the natural affordance between the nouns were removed, thus controlling for event probability. Using this novel "whatdunit?" agent selection task, 256 children 7-11 years old listened to two structures with canonical word order and two with noncanonical word order. After each sentence, children selected as quickly as possible the picture of the noun they believed was "doing the action." Children interpreted sentences with canonical word order with greater accuracy and speed than those with noncanonical word order. Older children (mean age = 10 years, 8 months) were more accurate and faster than younger children (mean age = 8 years, 1 month) across all sentence forms. Both older and younger children demonstrated similar error patterns across sentence type. The "whatdunit?" task also proved to have strong validity and reliability, making it suitable for studies with children with specific language impairment.

Summary: German belongs to those languages that allow a free permutation of subject, direct object and indirect object in verb final sentences. Five linear precedence (LP) principles have been postulated to describe preference patterns for the different word orders ( Uszkoreit, 1986 ). The present study tested if these rules are valid for meaningful German sentences only or also hold for pseudo-word sentences, i.e., if they are independent of semantic language aspects. Twelve students saw sentences in six different but legal word orders and in one illegal word order, either with normal German words or pronounceable pseudo-words. They had to answer a question focussing on the thematic role of one or more complements. In addition, they rated the acceptability of a subset of sentences in all experimental conditions. The canonical word order was processed fastest and processing times increased the more LP-principles were violated, both for normal and pseudo-word sentences. Moreover, acceptability ratings decreased monotonously with an increasing deviation of the sentences from its canonical word order, again irrespective of the stimulus material. The ungrammatical permutation received the lowest acceptability ruting. These results imply that the LP-principles describe syntactical preferences independent of meaning, at least in isolated sentences.

Language comprehension relies on integrating the perceived utterance with prior expectations. Previous investigations of expectations about sentence structure (the structural prior) have found that comprehenders often interpret rare constructions nonliterally. However, this work has mostly relied on analytic languages like English, where word order is the main way to indicate syntactic relations in the sentence. This raises the possibility that the structural prior over word order is not a universal part of the sentence processing toolkit, but rather a tool acquired only by speakers of languages where word order has special importance as the main source of syntactic information in the sentence. Moving away from English to make conclusions about more general cognitive strategies (Blasi et al., 2022), we investigate whether the structural prior over word order is a part of language processing more universally using Hindi and Russian, synthetic languages with flexible word order. We conducted two studies in Hindi (Ns = 50, 57, the latter preregistered) and three studies with the same materials, translated, in Russian (Ns = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical word order (subject-object-verb in Hindi, subject-verb-object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object-subject-verb in Hindi, object-verb-subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

While a clear variability of canonical word order across languages has been found, such a finding is not reflected in recent neuroimaging studies of language processing. Languages having a canonical word order of Subject- Object-Verb (SOV) in a sentence make up approximately 43% of world languages, while languages having a Subject- Verb-Object (SVO) word order make up approximately 37%. Sufficient attention has not been given to this typological difference in neuroimaging studies. In this article, we review neuroimaging studies of sentence processing to examine whether the typological difference of canonical word order in a sentence is represented in brain activation results or not. As a result of this literature survey, an effect from the difference in canonical word order was found to exist between SVO and SOV languages for brain activation during sentence comprehension. This effect was found mainly in the left inferior and middle frontal gyri, precentral gyrus, supplemental motor area, inferior and middle temporal gyri, temporal pole, hippocampus, and cerebellum. These results imply that a difference in canonical word order causes a different sentence processing pattern, as well as a different load in the working memory process.