Chapter 7 - Basic Word Order in Language and Natural Order of Thought

Summary

Chapter 7 turns our attention to basic word order in language and natural order of thought. In his seminal work, Greenberg (1963) observed that a vast majority of the world’s languages have one of the SO word orders as their basic word order. It is interesting to note that the distribution is heavily biased even among the three SO orders, with SOV being the most frequent, which indicates that SOV has some special status among the six possible word orders in some sense. Why should this be the case? To address this question, Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) showed short animations depicting transitive events (e.g., a girl twisting a knob) to speakers of four languages (Chinese, English, Spanish [all SVO], and Turkish [SOV]). The participants were then asked to describe the depicted events by using only their hands, i.e., with gestures. The speakers of all four languages dominantly used the agent–patient–action order in their gestures, regardless of the basic word order of their languages. Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008: 9167) took these results to suggest that the agent–patient–action order reflects the natural sequencing of an event representation and that developing languages use it as the default pattern, thus displaying an SOV word order.