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The origin and evolution of word order.

Murray Gell-Mann¹, Merritt Ruhlen

¹Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. mgm@santafe.edu

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|October 12, 2011

Summary

All human languages may stem from one ancestor, likely with Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. Syntactic change predominantly moved from SOV to Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), with rare reversions and rare orders originating from SOV.

Area of Science:

Comparative Linguistics
Historical Linguistics
Language Evolution

Background:

Recent research suggests a single proto-language for all human languages.
Most extant languages exhibit a basic Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) or Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) sentence structure.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the word order of the ancestral human language.
To trace the evolutionary pathways of syntactic change in word order.

Main Methods:

Comparative analysis of word order distributions across attested languages.
Reconstruction of historical linguistic data based on phylogenetic trees.

Main Results:

The ancestral language likely possessed a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order.

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Syntactic change primarily follows the progression SOV > SVO > VSO/VOS, with occasional SVO reversions.

Diffusion plays a role but is not the primary driver of word order evolution.

Rare word orders (OVS, OSV) appear to derive directly from SOV.

Conclusions:

The evolution of word order is largely unidirectional, originating from SOV.
Understanding ancestral language structure provides insights into universal linguistic principles.