There are six different word orders, ways your language could arrange a basic sentence.
The most popular in the world?
Preferred by 43% of languages, it's subject, then object, then verb.
So what is it about this particular type, why does it get the starring role
in the word order story?
Why do so many people speaking so many languages love SOV?
Last time we met the rarest word order, OSV.
Along the way we learned it's rare to put the object first in a basic sentence.
It's less uncommon but still unusual to begin with a verb.
Instead, a sweeping 84% of the world's languages prefer starting with subjects.
And of those, in study after study, sample after sample, the clear number one is SOV.
OSV is mainly restricted to, remember where?
The Amazon, with one exception I'll mention later.
SOV on the other hand truly spans the world.
So yeah, SOV is popular.
More than popular though, it has a reputation, across times and places.
Historically, SOV may be the preferred order in ancient languages by a landslide.
Geographically, SOV might top the charts in every large language area, in languages
both signed and spoken.
Mentally, perhaps SOV is even the default for humanity, the word order of
the language of our thoughts.
Those are superlatives!
In our short time together today, I want to journey toward that last superlative, about
thinking in SOV.
Then I'll bring back our model of the hows and whys from last time, and with just one
tweak I'll actually make SOV look, if anything, even more impressive.
Slow down for a moment.
I realize I'm speaking English right now, and this – flipping your V and O – can
feel like a foreign concept.
Imagine what it's like to speak an SOV language, having to wait until the end of a sentence
to know what the verb is.
Play along!
Tell me: picture A or picture B, which one am I about to describe in SOV?
Ahem.
The writer yesterday evening the word "green" by the fire during a rainstorm on a piece
of paper...
wait for it!...
erased!
This is a garden path sentence, meant to lull you into one interpretation before
yanking you back at the end with that verb.
(It's funny because I could've said "wrote" but you had to stay tuned for that "erased"!)
And yet this order – the writer a word erased, the capybara food ate,
the baker a cake baked – this is the most popular order!?
Why?
To understand why SOV is so widespread and actually less unpredictable than my silly
drawn-out example suggests, we need to rethink what we're really after when we look to spot
a sentence's esses, oes and vees.
Linguists out there might be eminently concerned with the placement of objects and subjects
relative to verbs.
What about you, how do you go through life?
When I picture an event and I try to communicate it, I feel less invested in arcane questions
of syntax. It's more about:
who? did? what?
What happens if we treat this that way, like more than a sentence?
It's an event, a story about what people and animals do in the world: someone doing something.
The baker baked a cake.
Or to put it in SOV, the baker a cake baked.
To match this word order's fame, linguists gifted me with an analogy so fitting that
it inspired the artwork for this video.
Lest you think this was all just set dressing.
Within this event there's an action and the roles played in performing that action.
These roles of performer and performed-on are the actor/agent and the undergoer/patient.
(Patient always sounds like such a strong word. I realize it means sufferer.
I don't want you to suffer from my verbs! Memorable tho.)
So now we have an action, a patient and an agent.
How are we supposed to order them?
Well, do we need to?
We're two videos deep into this word order stuff and haven't even asked ourselves if
it's necessary in the first place.
If we know there's an action, actor and acted-upon, couldn't we get by on meaning alone?
If roles provide enough of a clue, it's a strong cue... why order at all?
Here, daydream along with me once more.
I already asked you to imagine yourself speaking an SOV language.
Now stretch a bit and wonder: what if we had free word order?
Ate food the capybara.
A nail hammered the worker.
Words the writer scribbled.
None of these was in English-friendly SVO.
Were they really that hard to follow?
So many of our sentences are like this – you can reverse the words, but it's harder to
reverse the meaning.
We bring our everyday expectations to sentences: food isn't the one doing the eating,
nails aren't hammering, words aren't scribbling people.
Indeed, many languages do stop there, staying flexible, leveraging context.
And if your language were among those ever-flexers, you would join this no-dominant-order crowd.
They make up a detectable percentage of languages alongside the six types.
They're the ones with the ant as their mascot!
All languages flex, but their whole thing is harnessing enough underlying flexibility
that it's hard to pin them down to one neutral word order.
Join in on their flexible antics and try to follow what I'm about to say: baked a cake the baker,
the baker a cake baked, a cake the baker baked.
Do you picture anything but a cake being baked, and a baker doing the baking?
Then again, try this one, imagine it flexibly ordered: the cat the raven watches.
Who's watching whom? Gotcha!
That was my attempt at a reversible sentence.
Since you can think about it both ways, through either perspective, the cat or the raven,
at least out of context,
what hints or clues could we use to keep track of the roles of agent and patient?
Well, tag them to track them, mark the participants!
The academic literature uses the term "the entities", sounds ominous to me, but ok: mark
the entities involved in the action, with case markers on your nouns.
Or mark the action, let the verb tag who's involved.
They're useful not just for obvious cases, haha.
These basic, neutral sentences aren't always common sentences in a language.
In practice, many languages find them awkward, unwieldy, a bit too deliberate.
Instead, why not drop, when already understood, the agent, or the patient, or both.
Cake baked.
You know who?
Baker baked.
You know what?
Or even just: baked.
Must I repeat roles to remind you of what we both already know?
Now when it comes to "watched the cat" versus "the cat watched", in SOV those could otherwise
look identical, so case markers help us distinguish them.
Flexible languages use both of those cues, meaning and marking.
SOV languages do, too.
Even if they keep verbs final like in our garden path sentence, they might scramble
all the ~ ahem ~ entities before the verb.
It's no problem keeping track of them if you mark cases!
And woah do SOV languages love their subject and object markers.
That's great and all but it doesn't get us to the heart of SOV languages.
The cue, THE cue that defines them is the one that brings us here today: word order.
Pick one, rigidify one, grammaticalize one like most languages do, and we end up back
at this popularity contest.
So why did the SOV sentence get the starring role in this video about word order?
Its agent told it to be patient before they say "action"!
Cringe linguistic jokes aside, the sentence we're after really has an agent-like subject
and a patient-like object.
So an SOV sentence reflects an event order of agent, then patient, then action.
SOV's – or APV's – starring role in the word order story has attracted streams of
researched attention devoted to uncovering how SOV earned its reputation.
Among its standout superlatives, this one struck me as the superlativest.
Why is Agent-Patient-Action called, in grandiose terms, the universal order, the word order
of the language of thought?
Alright, before I give you the answer, try to give me one first.
If a linguist took your own language off the table and asked you to gesture or arrange
pictures or invent your own way to communicate an event, what order would you use?
Events.
Most events we've been talking about have a very human basic shape:
someone acted on something.
Baker cake baked, capybara corn ate, writer word wrote.
These events are non-reversible – even if we swap orders,
we can discern what they're about.
A basic someone-did-something event in our world has a human acting on an inanimate object.
In other words, many of our most basic sentences map to events where we're thinking about a
who acting on a what.
Like the baker baking a cake. Or yes, the capybara eating corn.
Ok.
An experiment tasks you with showing me three pictures of a human, acting,
on something inanimate.
How would you arrange them?
Answers will vary, but an easy guess is, surprisingly regardless of our language, we tend to
prefer humans before inanimate objects before actions.
Seemingly implying SOV.
Sentences subject humans to special treatment, and they object to inanimates.
(Not done with the puns yet; I'll back off but allow me a few more before credits roll.)
So you're a budding language, and you're tasked with canonizing one order.
You notice that the humans really like the-person some-thing did.
You do some linguistics: turn that into roles, set up the who that did it, the what that
was done, then the doing, hit play, call action!
Voilà, it's Agent-Patient-Verb.
Make it canon in your language's grammar, and you've got Subject-Object-Verb.
If this is how things work, then SOV is the syntactic layer of an underlying
human-inanimate-action preference.
Short and sweet, SOV is the word order of your thoughts.
If true, when it comes to events with animate doers acting on inanimate undergoers, we basically
think in SOV!
Unless we switch things up.
Say both the agent and the patient are animate, and both feel like possible agents.
Well, that was the cat and raven predicament.
What happens then?
Save that for someday when we get to SVO.
So is that it?
Are SOV languages SOV because of this underlying universal preference?
We all think in SOV, everyone else is being derivative?
Not quite.
When it comes to individual languages and their word order preferences, there's something
far more influential than the universal language-of-thought factor.
Last time for understanding OSV, I drew a model.
Bring it back in.
If OSV's rarity taught us how all languages flex, here's what we can
learn from SOV's popularity.
I've spent most of our minutes focused on one influencer, that universal factor.
There are other influences though, namely other languages: genealogically your language's
family, and areally your language's neighbors.
Then there's flexibility, an underlying spectrum of word order variation.
All these influences get funneled through filters that constrict your sentences or bend
them to your situation and surroundings.
I'm trying to make sure SOV is watchable even if you haven't seen OSV, but this model reminds
me, wow did we cover a lot last time!
From everything so far, I've led us to expect that SOV is SOV because of
that universal factor.
It's the word order of thought, after all.
But calculate out these factors, and this might all be less about universality,
more about family.
Universals do influence and predict a language's word order.
So do the word orders in neighboring languages, if less so.
By far though the biggest factor is the word order
in the language your language descends from.
If OSV compelled us to add flexibility as an input into our model, SOV teaches us we
should split the "other languages" input into two, since areas and families have very different
influences on a language's word order.
It doesn't matter how hard you think, or who you meet, your words can't escape being sentenced
to your family's influence.
And in fact that bias is so strong that if we remove family bias,
the rankings look very different.
Strip out family bias, and while we're at it, areal bias too.
(Areal in linguistics is about areas, places and neighbors, not skies.)
Who emerges on top?
Who gets reranked?
Well, factoring out genealogical and areal advantages, most orders shrink in popularity
or stay flat... except flex and SOV.
And that gap between first place SOV and second place SVO opens to a chasm.
It seems merely a few families, and not independent facts about languages, are responsible for
SVO being as much of a runner up as it is.
That's a good place to admit this commenter is correct, there's much more worth saying
about the role of colonialism in the spread of SVO families, coming mostly at
the expense of SOV languages.
Empires and colonization pushing SVO languages ahead, that's full of stories.
Power and its impacts on languages strike again...
So, is SOV because was SOV because had been SOV therefore will be SOV?
Until forced to become SVO?
Well of course history isn't all force and family, and language change isn't simply
SVO vs SOV.
One fantastic exception is an Oceanic language that recently in history made an unusual shift
from the most popular order to the rarest.
Yes, Tobati went from SOV to OSV.
That's the exception.
It's still an SOV world out there.
Tantalizingly, is there another piece to this story?
What if SOV-in-the-brain-ism is great for thought but not for spreading information?
What if all languages are shifting from an SOV past to a future where we'll be living
in an SVO world?
But that's for another time.
Until then, humans keep being agents of patient verbiage, continuing to object before we act.
SOV, you remain number one, and are if anything undercounted.
Thank you for spending another video with me getting animated about word orders,
first rare and now popular.
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