Day 5/30: What does word order reveal about our minds?

What kind of word order do most languages use?

I’ve been reading up on how different language structure their sentences recently, and noticed a couple interesting things concerning word order. To describe a language’s unmarked (most commonly used in declarative sentences) word order, you have to look at the three most important elements of a sentence: the Subject, the Verb and the Object. The basic word order in English is exactly that:

The cat	ate	the fish.
Subject	Verb	Object

 

Languages like French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, etc. are very similar to English in this respect: actually, most – if not all – Indo-European languages seem to share this pattern. Of course, some languages, such as the Slavic ones, allow the constituents to be moved around rather freely, but the basic word order is still SVO. The same for German, which has a SOV word order in some types of sentences.

There’s also a number of languages belonging to other families that use the SVO word order, such as Finnish, Khmer and Swahili. Thus, it’s easy to assume – particularly if you’re only familiar with Indo-European languages – that this is a feature that most languages in the world share.

This is, however, not true. If we take the number of languages as a criterium (as opposed to, for example, the number of speakers), the most common word order is Subject Object Verb. In this group we can find Korean, Japanese, Persian, Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Basque… That’s quite a lot of languages from different families.

Now, what about the remaining four possibilities: VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS? This is when things start to get tricky. There’s only a handful languages (that’s been researched and analyzed!) that belong to those groups. As for VSO, there’s for example Classical Arabic, ancient Egyptian and Celtic languages. VOS languages include Fijian and Malgasy, belonging to the Austronesian family.

And as for Object-first languages (OSV and OVS), it seems only a few single cases have been found, such as Hixkaryana, Xavante and Apurinã, all spoken by indigenous tribes in South America.

Summary

The majority of the world’s languages is Subject-initial, using either the SOV or SVO word order. Verb-initial languages are much less common, but not unheard of. Object-initial languages are extremely uncommon.

What’s the meaning behind that?

There must be some. After all, if word order was assigned completely arbitrary, all the six patterns would be distributed evenly across languages. But they are not. For some reason, putting the subject first seems to be the most intuitive way to arrange information. So, does it reflect the way the human brain stores and processes information? Does it mean that for our minds, the doer is more important than the action? (Assuming that the constituent that comes first is indeed more important). Perhaps it just lies in the human nature that we want to know who performed an action first, and what they did later.

This is definitely a fascinating issue, but also rather confusing…