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Published October 18, 2011 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The origin and evolution of word order

Abstract

Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language. If that is so, then this language—like nearly all extant languages—most likely had a basic ordering of the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) in a declarative sentence of the type "the man (S) killed (V) the bear (O)." When one compares the distribution of the existing structural types with the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages, four conclusions may be drawn. (i) The word order in the ancestral language was SOV. (ii) Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion. (iii) Diffusion, although important, is not the dominant process in the evolution of word order. (iv) The two extremely rare word orders (OVS and OSV) derive directly from SOV.

Additional Information

© 2011 National Academy of Sciences. Contributed by Murray Gell-Mann, August 26, 2011 (sent for review August 19, 2011) We thank Joan Bybee, Bill Croft, and T. Givón for their criticism of an earlier version of this paper, and the Santa Fe Institute for its support of this research. In addition, the work of the first author was supported by the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, The Bryan J. and June B. Zwan Foundation, and Insight Venture Management, which are gratefully acknowledged. The results of this paper were first presented at a workshop on "Arrows of Time and Founder Effects in Language Evolution" organized by the authors at the Santa Fe Institute in December 1997. Author contributions: M.G.-M. and M.R. designed research; M.R. performed research; M.G.-M. and M.R. analyzed data; and M.G.-M. and M.R. wrote the paper. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Data deposition: The data reported in this paper have been deposited in A Global Linguistic Database, http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygtnnl. This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1113716108/-/DCSupplemental.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 23, 2023