

When using gestures, rules of grammar remain S-O-V - silentbicycle
http://www.physorg.com/news134065200.html

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karmaVS
Despite what the article seems to imply, S-O-V is also the most common
standard word order (in number of languages, though almost certainly not in
number of native speakers, given that both English & Chinese are both S-V-O)

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iamwil
aren't most latin language descendents S-V-O? The only S-O-V languages I can
think of off the top of my head are Japanese and Korean. Anyone know about
African or South American languages?

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Scriptor
Actually, French is S-O-V when you're using pronouns. Some quick testing with
Google Translate suggests that Spanish might follow the same rule as well.

My first language, Bengali, an Indo-European language spoken in Bangladesh and
thus distantly related to Latin, is S-O-V. I'm assuming from this that Hindi
and other Indian subcontinental languages are as well.

I think S-O-V makes sense when communicating visually. Say someone kicks a
ball. Initially you see a person and a ball. Then you see the person kick it.
The action comes after the presence of the two objects. You don't see a
person, see him kick, and only then see the ball.

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maw
_Actually, French is S-O-V when you're using pronouns._

Can you share an example? Admittedly, my French isn't too hot, but I'm
curious.

I'd be interested in an example Spanish (which I'm a lot better at than
French) too.

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Scriptor
My French is a bit rusty, but here are some examples I can think of right now:

Je le mange - I eat it.

Je tu le donne - I give it to you.

'le' means 'it', and 'tu' means 'you'. So literally, the first example would
be "I it eat", and the second would be "I to you it give".

I don't know Spanish very well, but I pulled this off of Google translate:

Yo lo vi - I saw it

I'm assuming 'lo' is 'it', and 'vi' is 'saw'.

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maw
_I'm assuming 'lo' is 'it', and 'vi' is 'saw'._

Duh! Yes, you are of course correct. My excuse for forgetting: familiarity
might not always breed contempt, but sometimes it breeds a real lack of
observation!

As an aside, archaic (and archaically styled) Spanish is often SVO even with
object pronouns. So you'll see things like "díjole" in Quijote.

(It's "te" and not "tu" in French, btw. Tu's only used as a subject.)

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whacked_new
I guess it makes sense to say this evidences a stack-based model of human
memory.

push memory boy

push memory ball

push action kick

evaluate.

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a-priori
I think the reason most languages are either SVO or SOV has more to do with
memory recall time. Putting the subject at the start of the sentence maximizes
the time the brain has to retrieve information about the subject, and probably
then speeds parsing of the remainder of the sentence by priming information
about the verb and object.

~~~
silentbicycle
Interesting. So, there's more processing needed for the context associated
with the subject and object rather than the action?

~~~
a-priori
Verbs (i.e, actions) can be very ambiguous, especially the common ones ( _to
be_ , _to do_ , etc.) and to parse a phrase you must first resolve this
ambiguity using the context of that phrase. This context comes from many
sources, including prior phrases and things like social and gestural cues, but
mostly from the subject and object of that particular phrase.

I'm not sure how relatively important the subject is versus the object for
resolving ambiguity, but I'm hypothesizing that by putting the subject as
early as possible in a phrase, SOV and SVO languages take advantage of priming
effects (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=257117356>) to speed
the parsing of a sentence.

(Edit: As a side note, I'm curious about free word order languages such as
Russian -- with what frequency and under what situations do they use the
various word orders?)

~~~
whacked_new
Priming effects play a much smaller role in sentence comprehension than
straight short term memory storage and retrieval. Speed influence is possible
but priming effects act on different timescales than that of on-line processes
used for comprehension.

Regarding your other response above, which I mostly agree with, there is a
common conception among Japanese speakers that in English, since the action is
mentioned halfway in the sentence, one can often predict the meaning of the
sentence and effectively stop listening; in Japanese (or any SOV), one has to
pay attention to the end otherwise they will have understood nothing.

This is somewhat true, in that you basically have to "suspend processing"
until the verb appears, whereupon can you "fire" the processes. (The part that
is mistaken by the Japanese is that when an English speaker figures out the
rest of the sentence is because the object is inferred. But the same level of
understanding is available.)

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jaytee_clone
I wonder if it will be more effective to use SOV in graphical presentations
like PowerPoint.

Company A -> Company B -> Acquire

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jfarmer
I think I'm turning Japanese!

