Word Order Patterns Research Articles

Argument ordering in simple sentences is affected by age of first language acquisition: Evidence from late first language signers of ASL.

Research on the language acquisition of deaf individuals who are exposed to accessible linguistic input at a variety of ages has provided evidence for a sensitive period of first language acquisition. Recent studies have shown that deaf individuals who first learn language after early childhood, late first-language learners (LL1), do not comprehend reversible Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences. The present study analyzed 478 signed productions elicited with pictures depicting simple events with one or two arguments by 28 signers. The argument order patterns of native signers converged with one another and the word order patterns of American Sign Language (ASL). By contrast, the ordering patterns of the LL1 signers did not converge with one another or with the patterns of the native signers. This indicates that early childhood is a period of heightened sensitivity to basic word order and may help explain why complex structures are difficult for LL1 signers to learn.

Subtitling Strategies of Buya Hamka Vol.1 Movie and Its Implication for Teaching Translation

The existences of subtitling (a part of audiovisual translation) in assisting people from other countries to enjoy movies have been new breakthroughs yet challenges to film industries. Nowadays, many Indonesian movies present the richness of local languages such as Javanese language, Minangkabau language, Batak language, and other local languages accompanied by English subtitles, so the movies can be watched not only by Indonesian audiences, but also viewers from other countries. One of the movies is Buya Hamka Vol.1 movie. This study aims to reveal the subtitling strategies used in Buya Hamka Vol.1 movie and its implication to teaching translation. This was a qualitative study with content analysis design. The data were the excerpts of conversations using Minangkabaunese (source language) compared to the correspond English (target language) subtitle provided by Netflix, and were analysed by using subtitling strategies theory by Gottlieb. The result showed that transfer is the most frequently strategy found in the study because of the common word order pattern employed in Minangkabaunese and English.

MALAY OF KUALUH WORD ORDER IN LABUHANBATU UTARA: A STUDY OF SYNTACTIC TYPOLOGY

The word order in the Kualuh Malay language spoken in North Labuhanbatu is the subject of this research, which aims to investigate it. Study In this research, the qualitative research method was utilized. Data for this study came primarily from interviews and participants' own experiences. The clauses or sentences that were discovered in the folklore served as the research's primary source of data. The studies of Miles and Huberman were utilized in order to make sense of the data. The process of assessing the research involved several stages, including data reduction, data display, and extracting conclusions from the data and verifying them. It is possible to draw the conclusion based on the findings of the research that the structure of the sentence patterns used in the Kualuh Malay language spoken in North Labuhanbatu contains VSO, SVO, OSV, VOS, OVS SV, VO, and OV. The word order pattern that should be followed in the declarative clause of a declarative sentence is SC, SVO, OVS. The word order pattern of the clause in this section is V-O and O-V, and it is vital that this pattern be followed. In an interrogative sentence, SV, SVO, VOS, and OSV can be used with nasal-affixed verbs or without them.

Word Order in the Communicative Structure of the Sentence in Russian and Persian Languages

The article introduces a comparative analysis of the word order in the communicative structure of the sentence in Russian and Persian. The research also covered means and methods of expressing communicative structure, as well as the rules and patterns of word order on the communicative level. In both languages, the communicative aspect of the sentence is closely related to the word order, which is the main tool of expressing the semantic division of the sentence. However, the communicative word order patterns are different. In the neutral speech, both languages put the theme (background information) in front of the rheme (actual information). In expressive speech, the Russian rheme is placed at the beginning of the sentence while the theme follows it. In other words, the thought moves from the actual information to the background information. When the communicative division of the sentence changes, the word order also changes. Based on the analysis of the word order in neutral and expressive speech, direct and inverted word orders are associated with the function that these components perform in the theme-rheme relationship. Persian, however, has a fixed word order, and allows for no inversion: the theme and the rheme are fixed, and the background information always precedes the new one. In the Russian language, any part of the sentence can be the theme or the rheme. In Persian, the function of the theme or the rheme belongs to particular sentence components.

The role of metalinguistic knowledge in third-language development among heritage and late bilinguals

Aims and objectives: This study examined whether bilinguals’ metalinguistic knowledge (MK) across both of their languages as well as heritage/late bilingual experience contributed to the initial development of third-language (L3) morphosyntax using Japlish, a semi-artificial language. Methodology: 48 heritage and 63 late English-Spanish bilinguals were exposed aurally to Japlish sentences containing word order patterns and case markers. Participants completed an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and a picture-matching task (PMT) immediately after exposure and again 2 weeks later as well as English and Spanish MK tests. Data and analysis: Logistic mixed effects analyses were run on AJT and PMT accuracy scores, grammatical/ungrammatical items, linguistic structure, and time of testing. MK scores and heritage/late bilingual status were included as predictors in the statistical model. Findings: MK significantly contributed to overall AJT scores, including grammatical and ungrammatical items and time of testing. MK also contributed to ungrammatical word order and case markers. For the PMT, MK significantly contributed to scores, especially during delayed testing. A weak correlation emerged between participants’ MK across both of their languages and their rule-based knowledge of Japlish linguistic structures. Heritage and late bilingual experiences did not significantly contribute to these results. Originality: This study included two different bilingual groups to investigate how variation in bilingual experience shapes additional language learning. It also advances our knowledge on the role of MK in the learning of linguistic structures not involved in transfer. Furthermore, a more nuanced examination of MK is considered as it relates to type of assessment, linguistic structure, and time of testing. Significance: The findings highlight the critical role of MK for both bilingual populations and its facilitative role in the development of initial L3 morphosyntax. The results are interpreted under the lens of structural sensitivity theory.

Processing Factors Constrain Word-Order Variation in German: The Trouble with Third Constructions

A subset of German control verbs allows for the discontinuous linearization of their infinitival complements, a word-order pattern known as the “third construction” pattern. Compared to alternative word-order options (notably, extraposition), third constructions are very rare in present-day German. Here we ask whether the third construction pattern’s low occurrence frequency can be accounted for by processing factors. We report the results from a self-paced reading task and a production priming task investigating whether third constructions are difficult to comprehend, difficult to produce, or both. Our results show that the third construction pattern’s local structural ambiguity impedes comprehension, and that the pattern is also resistant to priming. We conclude that this word-order pattern is an example of a “latent” construction that is grammatically licensed but strongly dispreferred in language use because easier-to-process word-order variants are available.

Good-enough processing, home language proficiency, cognitive skills, and task effects for Korean heritage speakers' sentence comprehension.

The present study investigates how heritage speakers conduct good-enough processing at the interface of home-language proficiency, cognitive skills (inhibitory control; working memory), and task types (acceptability judgement; self-paced reading). For this purpose, we employ two word-order patterns (verb-final vs. verb-initial) of two clausal constructions in Korean-suffixal passive and morphological causative-which contrast pertaining to the mapping between thematic roles and case-marking and the interpretive procedures driven by verbal morphology. We find that, while Korean heritage speakers demonstrate the same kind of acceptability-rating behaviour as monolingual Korean speakers do, their reading-time patterns are notably modulated by construction-specific properties, cognitive skills, and proficiency. This suggests a heritage speaker's ability and willingness to conduct both parsing routes, induced by linguistic cues in a non-dominant language, which are proportional to the computational complexity involving these cues. Implications of this study are expected to advance our understanding of a learner's mind for underrepresented languages and populations in the field.

Comprehension of active, passive, and causative sentences by Japanese-speaking children with intellectual disabilities and typical development

ABSTRACT This study aimed to identify the comprehension strategies employed for active, passive, and causative sentences and the involvement of phonological memory, which is a subsystem of working memory, in the comprehension skills of Japanese-speaking children with intellectual disability (ID) compared to those with typical development (TD). The participants were 29 children with ID and 18 children with TD who were matched according to mental and vocabulary ages and phonological memory scores. A picture selection method was employed as a sentence comprehension task. The stimulus sentences were grouped into four patterns of word order: subject (S) – object (O) – verb (V), OSV, SV, and OV. For example, in active sentences, the subject and object are assigned to agent and patient, respectively. The results indicated that children in both groups made comprehension errors for sentences that lacked information regarding the agent and sentences in which the two-noun sequence inverts the typical agent – patient or instructor – instructed order. Phonological memory’s involvement in sentence comprehension varied according to the combination of participant groups, sentence types, and patterns. The results suggest that both children with ID and TD relied on agent bias, whereby children consider the first noun to denote the actor and a word order strategy of interpreting a sequence of two noun phrases followed by the transitive verb as agent – patient – act. Furthermore, phonological memory underpins understanding of the relationships among arguments, particularly in the case of sentences for which agent bias or word order strategy may result in misinterpretation.

Linearization and unaccusativity: The relative order of dative and nominative arguments with five German verbs of success and failure

The present study maps out the word order distributions in verb-second clauses of five German verbs of success and failure: gelingen ‘to succeed’, glücken ‘to succeed’, missglücken ‘to fail’, misslingen ‘to fail’, and missraten to fail’. Given their status as unaccusatives, they display an asymmetric mapping between case marking and thematic roles. As a consequence, several researchers have argued that they sanction an inversion of the canonical nominative-before-dative word order pattern. Two positions emerge: those scholars who associate these verbs with a dative-before-nominative order and those who claim that they license both a dative-before- nominative order as well as a nominative-before-dative order. A corpus study of 982 tokens principally shows the latter claim to be true in that, in a configuration with double NPs, the Nom-Dat order is attested 200 times (or 40%), and the Dat-Nom order 299 times (or 60%). Remarkably, when both arguments are realised as pronouns, the variation in word order is neutralised almost entirely in favour of the nominative-before-dative order.

Effects of speaker types and L1 backgrounds on the linguistic complexity of learners’ writing

AbstractThis study investigated the differences in linguistic complexity between different types of English users, including native speakers (NS), English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, and English as a second language (ESL) learners in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. Furthermore, we explored how first language backgrounds affect linguistic complexity. Our dataset contains 2272 argumentative essays produced by English NSs and upper‐intermediate learners from four ESL and six EFL countries/regions. Results showed that significant differences existed between the writings of NS, EFL, and ESL regarding overall and syntactic complexity. Specifically, the rank of overall complexity (NS > ESL > EFL) indicates that learners from countries/regions with higher exposure to English tend to produce overall more complex writings. Concerning syntactic complexity, EFL learners produce the most complex writings, while NS produces the least complex, indicating that essays written by EFL learners contain the most fixed word order patterns. In contrast, no significant difference was detected in morphological complexity among the NS, ESL, and EFL groups, suggesting that native and upper‐intermediate non‐NSs exhibit a similar range of morphological forms in their writings. Additionally, our results showed a larger effect of first language backgrounds over English speaker types on linguistic complexity, thus informing teachers to implement targeted writing instructions for learners from different countries.

Mandarin Word Order: Syntactic Typology

This research is entitled Tataurut Kata Bahasa Mandarin:Tipologi Sintaksis. The theory used to examine the linguistic phenomena of Mandarin in this study includes two theories, namely the word order typology theory by Greenberg and the theory of relational grammar by Comrie. The research data consisted of Mandarin phrases, clauses, and sentences obtained from the Xunbao newspaper and Mandarin books. The research method used is a qualitative. The results of this study are presented using a formal method. Based on the formulation of the problem and research objectives, the results of the study show that the order pattern of Mandarin word order is SPO/SVO. As for changes in word order patterns, they can turn into SOV because O switches position with V after becoming a passive sentence. The word order pattern in imperative sentences is S-P/S-P-O. Under certain conditions, S can be eliminated but does not change the pattern. Declarative sentences have the S-P/S-P-O pattern. S is to the left of P and cannot precede P. If this occurs, then the pattern is unacceptable. Interrogative sentences have a word order pattern S-P or S-V. Chinese interrogative sentence markers can be located in the middle of a sentence and at the end of a sentence. These markers do not affect the basic pattern of word order, that P always precedes S. S is to the left of P or is praverbal. Through a syntactic typology approach, Mandarin is included in the ergative language type. Mandarin language treats S the same as P (patient) but differently from A (agent).

WORD ORDER STRATEGIES IN THE OLD HIGH GERMAN NEGATIVE SENTENCE

This paper presents a description of word order patterns in Old High German with special emphasis given to the negative constructions. The Old Germanic syntax exhibits a relatively high variety in ordering constituents in the surface sentence structure, derived from the SOV-, SVO- and VSO-patterns. The study highlights the peculiarities of OHG word order with its verb-first, verb-second, and verd-third/last position of the finite verb regarding the conditions of such syntactic arrangement. The special attention is paid to the negative clauses, with the emphatically charged NEG-clitic in the proposition to the foregrounded finite verb. Sentence negation strategies in OHG (eighth-eleventh century) that display early signs of grammaticalization have been presented in the context of the available linguistic triggers, i.e., structural pressure and discourse specific to requirements of the texts under consideration. The paper provides the data-based analysis of NEG V1 patterns, retrieved from the OHG sources, aiming to show the role of the negative clitic in the word order arrangement. We assume that it was the interaction between the specific samples of the Old High German discourse and grammar that brought about the foregrounding of the negated head-initial VP. The discourse prose is regarded as a special case in the overall bulk of texts in the religious prose. The material shows that preposed negative clitic is placed separately or merged with the finite verb. The last option is represented rather strong in the negative verb-initial sentences. It is claimed that negation itself is an influential factor of the verb-first word order tightly related to the discourse peculiarities, shaped by the features of the religious texts of the mentioned period.

Lability and the rigidification of word order: evidence from Early Middle English

AbstractThis article analyzes quantitatively the effect of five linguistic features on the position of the object in Early Middle English. Four of them have long been explored in the literature: object type, object length, clause type and type of verbal cluster (±auxiliary). The fifth feature, lability, has so far been given less attention. Lability is the possibility that a given verb alternates between an unaccusative and transitive frame without morphological coding. This makes lability an instance of morphological syncretism. This study tests the hypothesis that, for disambiguation purposes, labile transitive verbs show a more consistent word order (VO in this case) than non-labile transitives. If confirmed, the hypothesis would point to a non-trivial connection between the increase of labile verbs and the move towards a fixed word order in Early Middle English. Such a connection has gone unnoticed in the existing literature, which, as far as the influence of morphological syncretism on word order is concerned, has focused almost exclusively on the effect of the loss of case marking. A total of 961 transitive clauses with labile and non-labile verbs were tagged for the above-mentioned five variables. Their effect on the choice between VO and OV is measured using statistical analysis. The conclusion is that verb lability is a significant predictor of VO in the period under scrutiny, with labile verbs thus spearheading the shift towards a stable word order pattern (VO) in English. The correlation between verb lability and word order rigidification demonstrated for Early Middle English in this article may be relevant for studies on word order from multiple perspectives: language-specific, typological, synchronic and diachronic.

A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order

Abstract 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

Word order in simple sentences of tri-lingual tri-modal deaf students*

Abstract This study explores word order patterns produced by deaf students who use Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Arabic. Nineteen students participated in a sentence elicitation task in which they retold events portrayed in 24 short videos in three language conditions: signed ISL, spoken Palestinian Arabic and written Modern Standard Arabic. A control group of 19 hearing students was tested in the two Arabic conditions. Results showed that SVO word order was the most frequent in both groups, and in all three languages. SOV word order, which is common in ISL but ungrammatical in Arabic, was produced only by the deaf group. Finally, unique word orders, specific to the signed modality were produced only in the ISL condition. The findings suggest that deaf students are sensitive to the syntactic structures of each language they use and show natural cross-linguistic interaction in their language use.

No Adjective Ordering Preferences in Jordanian Arabic Grammar.

This article offers evidence, which is based on acceptability judgement tasks, in favour of the absence of unmarked linear serializations of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Results from 16 experiments of acceptability judgements from 197 native speakers of JA point to the fact that JA places no adjective ordering. However, two factors are found to be significant. The first factor pertains to the number of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives. All possible word order patterns of different stacked adjectives are (fully) acceptable with two stacked adjectives. However, constructions with three or more stacked adjectives are significantly degraded. This is universally held, regardless of the type of the stacked adjectives (size, color, shape, etc.). We ascribe this to the third-factor effects (Chomsky in Linguist Inq 36(1):1-22, 2005) (particularly with reference to working memory and processing load) in restricting the possible number of adjectives in a given construction. A second factor relates to the syntactic position of the adjectives (attributive vs. predicative). The results reveal that attributive adjectives are significantly more acceptable than predicative adjectives (which can also be freely stacked in JA). This is also attributed to the effects of these factors favoring minimal computations. We follow O'Grady (Front Psychol 12:660296, 2021) in that the processing of across-clausal phenomena (as is the case with predicative adjectives) is more demanding than intra-clausal ones (as is the case with attributive adjectives).

Adjective position in the code-switched speech of Spanish and Papiamento heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Individual differences and methodological considerations.

This study examines adjective-noun order in code-switched constructions by heritage speakers of Spanish and Papiamento in the Netherlands. Given that Dutch differs from Spanish and Papiamento regarding the default position of the adjective, word order in the nominal domain creates a so-called "conflict site" in code-switching. Most accounts of word order patterns in code-switching focus on structural constraints, such as the matrix language or the strength of the EPP feature in Agr. Thus far, studies comparing the two models have not found compelling evidence for either of them. The present study takes a more comprehensive approach and considers several linguistic (matrix language, adjective language, and type of insertion) as well as extra-linguistic variables (e.g., age, age of onset, and patterns of exposure and use). Moreover, we compare heritage speakers of two different heritage languages that are linguistically similar (both Spanish and Papiamento exhibit postnominal adjectives), and share the same dominant societal language, but are likely to differ from each other in terms of certain sociolinguistic properties. 21 Spanish and 15 Papiamento heritage speakers (aged 7-54) in the Netherlands carried out a Director-Matcher task, aimed at eliciting nominal constructions containing switches. The results show that either the ML or the language of the adjective, or both, are important predictors for word order, although the data cannot disentangle these two factors. Moreover, the type of insertion was found to play a role: word order patterns for noun insertions differed from other types of insertions. In addition, the two groups did not behave similarly: Papiamento speakers were more categorical in their preference for noun-adjective order when inserting Dutch nouns into their heritage language than the Spanish speakers were. Finally, there was a great deal of individual variation, which seemed to be related mostly to the age of the participants: children and teen participants behaved differently from adults. These findings demonstrate that both linguistic and extra-linguistic play a role in determining how heritage speakers deal with conflict sites in the nominal domain. Particularly, the findings suggest that, at least for some communities and in some code-switching modes, children may need more time, or more input, too converge on adult-like code-switching norms.

Reconstructing variation in Indo-European word order

Abstract Word order is a central issue in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European syntax. Categorical approaches have proved to be inadequate because they postulate for the protolanguage a typological consistency which is absent in any of the attested daughter languages. Following recent research, we adopt a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences as a continuous variable. We analyze four word order patterns based on data extracted from treebanks of ancient Indo-European languages. After presenting our results for AdpN/NAdp, GN/NG, AN/NA, and OV/VO, we draw a number of conclusions concerning variation within individual languages, crosslinguistic variation, and variation in diachrony that support the claim that variability should be taken as the normal state across languages, including reconstructed stages. We conclude that a non-discrete approach has the advantage of leading to a reconstruction that better conforms to the situation known from real languages, with variation as a key feature.

Chinese Word Order in the Comparative Sino-Tibetan and Sociotypological Contexts

The present study discusses typology and variation of word order patterns in nominal and verb structures across 20 Chinese languages and compares them with another 43 languages from the Sino-Tibetan family. The methods employed are internal and external historical reconstruction and correlation studies from linguistic typology and sociolinguistics. The results show that the head-final tendency is a baseline across the family, but individual languages differ by the degree of head-initial structures allowed in a language, leading to a hybrid word order profile. On the one hand, Chinese languages consistently manifest the head-final noun phrase structures, whereas head-initial deviants can be explained either internally through reanalysis or externally through contact. On the other hand, Chinese verb phrases have varied toward head-initial structures due to contact with verb-medial languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, before reinstalling the head-final structures as a consequence of contact with verb-final languages in North Asia. When extralinguistic factors are considered, the typological north-south divide of Chinese appears to be geographically consistent and gradable by the latitude of individual Chinese language communities, confirming the validity of a broader typological cline from north to south in Eastern Eurasia.

Learning and the typology of word order: a model of the Final-over-Final Condition

This article investigates whether cross-linguistic generalizations may arise from asymmetries in learnability of competing syntactic patterns. The model presented here uses a domain- general statistical learner for parameter systems in order to probe whether languages violating the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC; Sheehan et al. 2017) might be difficult to learn, rather than syntactically impossible. In this model, no parameters ruled out *FOFC languages, and no penalties targeting them were built into the learner. Regardless, the results of two learning tasks demonstrate a correlation between the learnability of a word order pattern and its frequency in the typology. *FOFC languages were harder to learn, providing a possible explanation for their relative rarity.