Most Logical Word Order

[Škjakto]

I'm designing a language with more emphasis on logic and would like to know, which of the 6 word orders would be considered the most logical? Though I could simply be biased by my English-speaking background, I feel as if the most logical is SVO. For example, in Jim hit Bill, it is ordered chronologically. For Jim to hit Bill, Jim and Bill must (1) be at the location. Jim (2) throws a punch, (3) causing Bill to be hit. I'd love to hear any constructive criticism. -Škjakto

[mèþru]

Your argument doesn't rule out SOV.

[Duns Scotus]

Well, in formal logic, I'm a big fan of Łukasiewicz notation, which corresponds nicely to VSO. Conversely, if you prefer RPN, then I guess that corresponds to SOV.

[mèþru]

I do not really see how any of the six word orders are particularly logical compared to each other.

[Vijay]

Me, neither. I have never heard of any such thing as a "most logical word order." I don't think I think of natural languages as logical in general.

[----]

isn't it great when the "most logical" solution is the one you were using already

[kodé]

it depends what you mean by "logical." but if you adopt Kayne's antisymmetry approach to linearization, then SVO is the optimal word order.

[Pabappa]

Almost 20 yrs ago I decided to use SOV for all my languages. My argument was that it was the best for embedding in serntences with more than one verb, Because in SVO langs, if you have 2 verbs, the only way to do it in one sentence is to make the object of the 1st verb the subj of the 2nd. e.g. "this is the DOG that scared the CAT that ate teh RAT". but if you use SOV, you have the additional possiblity of giving either the S or the O 2 verbs. e.g. "Boy lollipop eat, milk drink." ---> "the boy that ate the lollipop is drinking his milk". Obv, its not that hard to just use a pronoun like "he" or "who" and make the SVO languages like English do the same thing, but I have always preferred conlangs that use lots of big words and few or no little ones. Thus I avoud pronouns wherever possible.

my first language used VO for the special case of passive verbs. e.g. "defeat army" ----> "the army was defeated." However, that was because it was an isolating language. now, i use inflections to mark verbs as passive.

sorry for bad typing, my eyes are bothering me

[cromulant]

I feel as if the most logical is SVO. For example, in Jim hit Bill, it is ordered chronologically. For Jim to hit Bill, Jim and Bill must (1) be at the location. Jim (2) throws a punch, (3) causing Bill to be hit. I'd love to hear any constructive criticism. -Škjakto

But you said first, Jim and Bill need to be at the location. So Jim and Bill, the S and O, need to come first. Then, and only then, does Jim throw a punch -- the verb. The verb comes last. If it comes in the middle -- "Jim hits..." -- Jim hits who? The foundation for there to even be a transitive verb has not been laid until Bill is introduced. As for the order of S and O, it seems pretty arbitrary.

Though actually, at least some oblique arguments, like the location, the time, the reason for the attack, the weapon used (if any), should come before the S, O and V if they are used in the sentence at all, i.e. "alley in grudge because sledgehammer with Jim Bill hit," with everything before "Jim" optional but outlawed before the core arguments. And these are the least important pieces of information, so perhaps chronological order is not logical order.

[Frislander]

I suppose you could argue that if you put agents on one side of the verb and patients on the other exclusively, as in an active-stative alignment, then you might argue that the most logical is either SVO or OVS, but even then I would still say that there is nothing inherently more "logical" about any one order.

[Chuma]

My conlang is also designed to be what you might call "logical", so I've given this some thought too.

As mentioned, VSO is the standard in formal logic, and many other kinds of formal languages. More generally, we tend to write the operation first and the argument later, like f(x), for example. Natural languages, as you may know, also have the tendency to put the "arguments" after; linguists call them "head" and "dependant", so we get head-initial and head-final languages. You could certainly argue that a logical language should be strictly one or the other. I think head-initial is a good deal more common, and it does seem more logical, since it puts the "important stuff" first, in some sense.

Natural languages also have a tendency to put topic before comment - that is, first the thing you are talking about, and then the thing you are saying about it. Subjects are often topics, which might be the reason why subject before object is so common.

You don't necessarily have to think of the verb as the head, though. Comparing with programming languages, sometimes the subject is basically seen as the head. But that would be pretty unorthodox for this kind of conlang.

Depending on where you're going with the logicalness, SVO might have another advantage. Since it puts one noun phrase on each side of the verb, you can drop one of them without ambiguity.
Example: "Quiet evening yesterday. Watched Batman. Bob cooked."
You can tell that "Batman" is an object, and "Bob" is a subject, because one is before the verb and one is after.

[Travis B.]

I tend to find claims that certain features in languages are "more logical" to be questionable at best myself.

[linguoboy]

I tend to find claims that certain features in languages are "more logical" to be questionable at best myself.

Without specifying a system of logic, it only leads to circularity.

There's some evidence for either SOV or SVO (depending on the semantics) being the most "natural" word order for human beings based on experiments with silent gestures. That is, when you ask people to mime a simple statement, they converge on these orderings regardless of the typology of their native languages.

[Travis B.]

I tend to find claims that certain features in languages are "more logical" to be questionable at best myself.

Without specifying a system of logic, it only leads to circularity.

There's some evidence for either SOV or SVO (depending on the semantics) being the most "natural" word order for human beings based on experiments with silent gestures. That is, when you ask people to mime a simple statement, they converge on these orderings regardless of the typology of their native languages.

I wonder if anyone has compared these examples with topic-comment structures, to elucidate whether it is really being the subject that conditions fronting or rather being the topic, with this being potentially confused by the fact that subjects are more likely to be topical than objects in imperfective moods.

[gach]

My instinct is for a topic-first interpretation being the primary one, but as you put it, this naturally leads to a tendency for subject-first word orders. So it's nevertheless a relevant result for strict word order languages.

[kodé]

to me, the reason "the most logical word order" is somewhat meaningless is that "subject" in the word order sense is a purely syntactic notion, and moreover one that conflates several different concepts, like 'agent', 'topic', 'animate'. logic deals with concepts, and it's not clear that agents, topics, and high-animacy entities are all "prior" in some sense to patients, comments, and low-animacy entities. moreover, i don't think we can take for granted that something coming first in word order means it's more important, more urgent or more salient. the whole "basic word order" idea is really just a useful generalization, but things like subjecthood and linear order are not quite as clear in reality as they are in our pretheoretical notions.

[Miekko]

My conlang is also designed to be what you might call "logical", so I've given this some thought too.

As mentioned, VSO is the standard in formal logic, and many other kinds of formal languages. More generally, we tend to write the operation first and the argument later, like f(x), for example. Natural languages, as you may know, also have the tendency to put the "arguments" after; linguists call them "head" and "dependant", so we get head-initial and head-final languages. You could certainly argue that a logical language should be strictly one or the other. I think head-initial is a good deal more common, and it does seem more logical, since it puts the "important stuff" first, in some sense.

Natural languages also have a tendency to put topic before comment - that is, first the thing you are talking about, and then the thing you are saying about it. Subjects are often topics, which might be the reason why subject before object is so common.

You don't necessarily have to think of the verb as the head, though. Comparing with programming languages, sometimes the subject is basically seen as the head. But that would be pretty unorthodox for this kind of conlang.

Depending on where you're going with the logicalness, SVO might have another advantage. Since it puts one noun phrase on each side of the verb, you can drop one of them without ambiguity.
Example: "Quiet evening yesterday. Watched Batman. Bob cooked."
You can tell that "Batman" is an object, and "Bob" is a subject, because one is before the verb and one is after.

You do realize that any real logician will understand that these are just conventional, and a situation where we wrote (x)f is not per se illogical in any way, don't you?

[HoskhMatriarch]

No grammatical feature is more logical than any other, as far as natural languages are concerned. You can make an SVO language if you want but that isn't more logical. I would say the most logical word order is to put the most important word first but I can't prove that's more logical so I can't claim that.

[mèþru]

Good luck on coming to a consensus with other people on what word is the most important...

[CatDoom]

No grammatical feature is more logical than any other, as far as natural languages are concerned. You can make an SVO language if you want but that isn't more logical. I would say the most logical word order is to put the most important word first but I can't prove that's more logical so I can't claim that.

Hypothetically speaking, some grammatical features *might* be more optimal than others in terms of the ability to express information efficiently. What you'd really have to look at is the morphophonology and the rate at which syllables are spoken. If one grammar can express a concept and cause it to be understood faster than another with no increase in the number of misunderstandings, then one could say that the grammar is more optimal in terms of expressing that particular concept.

That said, speed and clarity are kind of at odds with one another, and redundancy in language is often a feature rather than a bug. In any event, it's just a hypothesis, and probably not one in which syntax plays a significant role. *shrug*