Charades are SOV

When you make a sentence like “Englebert licked the donuts”, there are lots of ways to arrange Englebert and the donuts. And the licking. You could put Englebert first and the donuts somewhere later, which seems logical. Or the licking could come first, with Englebert at the end of it all and the donuts in the middle.

How you order them has a lot to do with which language you’re speaking. English speakers like to put Englebert (which your grade school teacher used to call the ‘subject’) at the front, the verb ‘licking’ next, and the donuts (the ‘object’) last. So English is a Subject-Verb-Object language, or SVO. Japanese, on the other hand, tends to go SOV.

A curious thing, though, is that about 90% of the world’s languages put the subject first, with 75% being either SVO or SOV. Only about 10 percent of the world’s languages put the object before the subject. Perhaps that’s not so strange. Subjects are the doers (usually), so it makes sense to most of us that the most active agent comes first.

That’s with words. But what kind of word order do we see when people are asked not to use words? That’s the subject (or object?) of this study.

For the study, the team tested 40 speakers of four different languages: 10 English, 10 Mandarin Chinese, 10 Spanish and 10 Turkish speakers. They showed them simple video sequences of activities and asked them to describe the action first in speech and a second time using only gestures.
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When asked to describe the scenes in speech, the speakers used the word orders typical of their respective languages. English, Spanish, and Chinese speakers first produced the subject, followed by the verb, and then the object (woman twists knob). Turkish speakers first produced the subject, followed by the object, and then the verb (woman knob twists).

But when asked to describe the same scenes using only their hands, all of the adults, no matter what language they spoke, produced the same order –– subject, object, verb (woman knob twists). When asked to assemble the transparencies after watching the video sequences (another nonverbal task, but one that is not communicative), people also tended to follow the subject, object, verb ordering found in the gestures produced without speech.

Is there something about the SOV order that most closely mirrors the structure of thought? Or is it just the easiest way to get the message across?

I’m filing this under ‘complicated, but interesting’.