"What is the most natural word order?"

[din]

My boyfriend found this article (from 2008, in Dutch) : http://www.kennislink.nl/publicaties/wa ... rdvolgorde

It refers to research done at the University at Chicago which concluded:
- The most natural word order is Subject Object Verb, despite more than half of the world's languages using a different word order.

They concluded this because:
- They had groups of speakers of different languages (with a different default word order) retell stories. When being asked to use gestures, they generally all depicted the verb last.
- This was also true when they were given images representing a subject, an object and an action.
- They argue that newly created languages (such as improvised sign language as used by deaf people) often follows the same order.

They conclude that SOV for that reason is clearer and less ambiguous (I don't follow).

This article (intended for secondary school students) does not refer to the paper they're reporting on, so I haven't actually read the paper itself.

Regardless of the conclusions they connect to this, it's still interesting that the participants mostly used SOV in their improvised sign language when taking part in the experiment.

(Also slightly odd that they selected English, Spanish, Chinese and Turkish speakers, because 3/4 of them are dominantly SVO.)

[Shrdlu]

It is natural because SVO puts the ego first.

[Hallow XIII]

"Despite more than half of the world's languages using a different word order" is a good one. You know that the fact that SOV is the most common word order on the planet is not a counter-argument to this, right?

[Grunnen]

Yeah, I read that a while back as well.

"Despite more than half of the world's languages using a different word order" is a good one. You know that the fact that SOV is the most common word order on the planet is not a counter-argument to this, right?

Well, if more than half of the languages follow some other order, then at least the effect is not very strong.

Also, what are the factors that determine the order people in the experiment used? Does that tell anything about 'natural word order'?

[Imralu]

Call me crazy, but I think gestures and language are different things. In gesture, to me, it seems natural to put the subject and the object first - set the scene, list the participants, then say what happened between them. Gestures are not standardised and may need a lot of context.

What about the fact that creoles are generally SVO?

[Melteor]

When the verb is in the middle it shows the relationship between the nouns; when the verb is at the end it allows the noun phrases to be separate from the verb phrase.

Are there any languages that show the relationship between the nouns (like some sort of transitivity marker between them) but are SOV?

[kodé]

I don't think either of the major word orders can effectively be reduced to the other without sacrificing the clarity of analyzing languages with one of the orders. I think a VO/OV parameter is useful here. At any rate, at least this universal SOV business is a nice cudgel to whack Kayne's Linear Correspondence Axiom with....

[Radius Solis]

Are there any languages that show the relationship between the nouns (like some sort of transitivity marker between them) but are SOV?

Yes. Most of them. The relationship is shown by a mechanism called "case marking".

[Vuvuzela]

Yes. Most of them. The relationship is shown by a mechanism called "case marking".

Only on the ZBB could you make a joke about someone not knowing what case marking is.

[Morrígan]

There are two issues. First, the truth is, we don't really have the data. Second, the six-way SOV/SVO/VSO/VOS/OSV/OVS whatever ordering isn't actually useful.

I may be somewhat biased towards a certain way of thinking, having been a student of Matthew Dryer, but the majority of clauses spoken in a language do not express both subject and object (a statement which itself assumes that "subject" is universally meaningful), so you often can't even figure out where a language would fit in the six-way typology.

Another problem comes from trying to sample from a representative population of languages which is not biased by genealogical or areal influence. Actually, this is probably the bigger problem since it's methodological - the other one is problem of theory alone.