Do we see word order patterns from silent gesture studies in a new natural language?

Abstract

Typological analysis clearly shows that the world's languages are not evenly distributed among all logically possible patterns.Of the six possible orderings of Subject (S), Object (O), and Verb (V), SOV and SVO orders are vastly overrepresented in the world's languages.Studies on the emergence of word order regularities in silent gesture by hearing non-signers (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, et al., 2008;Gibson et al., 2013) overwhelmingly find evidence for SOV ordering.Based on this type of evidence, it has been proposed that SOV ordering is the most basic ordering from which all other orders emerged.However, semantic properties of the meanings to be conveyed also influence word order in silent gesture.For instance, for intensional events (in which the object is possibly non-existent or dependent on the action; e.g., 'man thinks of guitar', 'woman builds house') a cross-linguistic preference for SVO was found (Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014).Recent work finds that meaning-dependent word order patterns typical of silent gesture disappear under the influence of interaction (Christensen et al., 2016) and cultural transmission (Schouwstra et al., 2016), in favor of more consistent word order usage.However, in these studies, word order usage never becomes completely regular.Here we investigate whether traces of the SOV/SVO pattern found in silent gesture can be observed in a new natural language: Nicaraguan Sign Language.This sign language, one of the youngest languages known to science, was born in the late 1970s with the founding of a new school for special education.Though instruction was in Spanish, students soon began to communicate with one another manually.As succeeding cohorts of students learn NSL, the language itself is changing rapidly.Though somewhat variable, NSL word order is strongly verb-final and predominantly SOV (Flaherty, 2014).However, these data are based exclusively on analysis of extensional events.If NSL word order is also influenced by semantic properties of the utterance's intended meaning, we would expect to see deviation from this SOV patterning.

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