Cover not available
Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 40:4 (2023) ► pp.532–556

Word order evolves at similar rates in main and subordinate clauses

Corpus-based evidence from Indo-European

ORCID logo | Uppsala University
| University of Zurich
| University of Zurich
In syntactic change, it remains an open issue whether word orders are more conservative or innovative in subordinate clauses compared with main clauses. Using 47 dependency-annotated corpora and Bayesian phylogenetic inference, we explore the evolution of S/V, V/O, and S/O orders across main and subordinate clauses in Indo-European. Our results reveal similar rates of change across clause types, with no evidence for any inherent conservatism of subordinate or main clauses. Our models also support evolutionary biases towards SV, VO, and SO orders, consistent with theories of dependency length minimization that favor verb-medial orders and with theories of a subject preference that favor SO orders. Finally, our results show that while the word order in the proto-language cannot be estimated with any reasonable degree of certainty, the early history of the family was dominated by a moderate preference for SVO orders, with substantial uncertainty between VO and OV orders in both main and subordinate clauses.
Keywords: word order evolution, rate of change, phylogenetic inference, Universal Dependencies, Indo-European
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and Methods
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Methods
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Supplementary materials
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 17 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20035.jin
References (92)
References
Baath, Rasmus. 2014. Bayesian First Aid: A package that implements Bayesian alternatives to the classical *.test functions in R. In UseR! 2014 – the International R User Conference, 861. [URL]
Bean, Marian C. 1983. The development of word order patterns in Old English. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Kamal K. Choudhary, Matthias Schlesewsky & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2015. The neurophysiology of language processing shapes the evolution of grammar: Evidence from case marking. PLoS ONE 10(8). e0132819. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bollback, Jonathan P. 2006. SIMMAP: Stochastic character mapping of discrete traits on phylogenies. BMC Bioinformatics 7(1). 88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard & Quentin D. Atkinson. 2012. Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science 337(6097). 957–960. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2002. Main clauses are innovative, subordinate clauses are conservative: Consequences for the nature of constructions. In Joan Bybee, Michael Noonan & Sandra Thompson (eds.), Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson, 1–17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cathcart, Chundra Aroor. 2018. Modeling linguistic evolution: A look under the hood. Linguistics Vanguard 4(1). 20170043. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Will, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall & Andrew Garrett. 2015. Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language 91(1). 194–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language universals and linguistic typology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cysouw, Michael. 2011. Understanding transition probabilities. Linguistic Typology 151. 415–431. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Danckaert, Lieven. 2017. The loss of Latin OV: Steps towards an analysis. In Enoch Aboh, Eric Haeberli, Genoveva Puskas & Manuela Schonenberger (eds.), Elements of comparative syntax. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeLancey, Scott. 1981. An interpretation of split ergativity and related patterns. Language 571. 626–657. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Demiral, Şükrü, Matthias Schlesewsky & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2008. On the universality of language comprehension strategies: Evidence from Turkish. Cognition 1061. 484–500. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. 1989. Large linguistic areas and language sampling. Studies in Language 13(2). 257–292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997. On the six-way word order typology. Studies in Language 21(1). 69–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013a. On the six-way word order typology, again. Studies in Language 37(2). 267–301. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013b. Order of Subject, Object and Verb. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. [URL]
Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray. 2011. Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature 473(7345). 79–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Felsenstein, Joseph. 1973. Maximum likelihood and minimum-steps methods for estimating evolutionary trees from data on discrete characters. Systematic Zoology 22(3). 240–249. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon. 2017. The placement of the head that maximizes predictability. An information theoretic approach. Glottometrics (39). 38–71. [URL]
Friedrich, Paul. 1975. Proto-Indo-European syntax: The order of meaningful elements. Butte: Montana College of Mineral Sciences.Google Scholar
Fuß, Eric. 2018. The OV/VO alternation in early German: Diagnostics for basic word order. In Gisella Ferraresi Agnes Jäger & Helmut Weiß (eds.), Clause structure and word order in the history of German. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Futrell, Richard, Tina Hickey, Aldrin Lee, Eunice Lim, Elena Luchkina & Edward Gibson. 2015. Cross-linguistic gestures reflect typological universals: A subject-initial, verb-final bias in speakers of diverse languages. Cognition 1361. 215–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Futrell, Richard, Kyle Mahowald & Edward Gibson. 2015. Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(33). 10336–10341. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gell-Mann, Murray & Merritt Ruhlen. 2011. The origin and evolution of word order. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(42). 17290–17295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1979. On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
. 1983. Topic continuity and word order pragmatics in Ute. In Talmy Givón (ed.), Topic continuity in discourse. A quantitative cross-language study, 141–214. John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Wing Chee So, Asli Özyürek & Carolyn Mylander. 2008. The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(27). 9163–9168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language, 58–60. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Greenhill, Simon J., Chieh-Hsi Wu, Xia Hua, Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray. 2017. Evolutionary dynamics of language systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(42). E8822–E8829. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette Marie. 1975. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. Harwood Academic.Google Scholar
Haupt, Friederike S., Matthias Schlesewsky, Dietmar Roehm, Angela D. Friederici & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2008. The status of subject-object reanalyses in the language comprehension architecture. Journal of Memory and Language 59(1). 54–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1983. Word order universals. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
2014. Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hemon, Roparz. 1975. A historical morphology and syntax of Breton. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.Google Scholar
Hock, Hans H. 2013. Proto-Indo-European verb-finality: Reconstruction, typology, validation. Journal of Historical Linguistics 3(1). 49–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hock, Hans Henrich. 1986. Principles of historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1991. Principles of historical linguistics (2nd edn.). Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, Matthew D. & Andrew Gelman. 2014. The No-U-Turn sampler: Adaptively setting path lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Journal of Machine Learning Research 15(1). 1593–1623. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Konstantin, Remco Bouckaert, Simon J. Greenhill & Denise Kühnert. 2021. Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of linguistic data using BEAST. Journal of Language Evolution 6(2). 119–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hooper, Joan B. & Sandra A. Thompson. 1973. On the applicability of root transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 4(4). 465–497. [URL]
Hudson, Richard A. 1984. Word grammar. Blackwell Oxford.Google Scholar
Huelsenbeck, John P., Rasmus Nielsen & Jonathan P. Bollback. 2003. Stochastic mapping of morphological characters. Systematic Biology 52(2). 131–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry. 1975. On the change from SOV to SVO: Evidence from Niger-Congo. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Word order and word order change, 267–305. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Jenny, Mathias. 2020. Verb-initial structures in Austroasiatic languages. In Mathias Jenny, Paul Sidwell & Mark J. Alves (eds.), Austroasiatic syntax in areal and diachronic perspective, 21–45. Boston: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kauhanen, Henri & George Walkden. 2018. Deriving the constant rate effect. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 36(2). 483–521. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kemmerer, David. 2014. Word classes in the brain: Implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience. Cortex 581. 27–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krebs, Julia, Evie Malaia, Ronnie B. Wilbur & Dietmar Roehm. 2018. Subject preference emerges as cross-modal strategy for linguistic processing. Brain Research 16911. 105–117. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony S. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001. Syntactic change. In Mark R. Baltin & Chris Collins (eds.), The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory. Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Wei-Wei & Mathias Jenny. 2022. Syntactic change in Palaungic – Exploring the origins of an atypical Austroasiatic relative construction. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 45(1). 23–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1992. Historical linguistics: An introduction. Routledge.Google Scholar
1974. Proto-Indo-European syntax. Austin & London: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Li, Charles N. 1980. Mechanisms of syntactic change. University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David. 1982. The language lottery: Toward a biology of grammars. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
. 1989. The child’s trigger experience: Degree-0 learnability. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12(2). 321–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. How new languages emerge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liu, Haitao. 2008. Dependency distance as a metric of language comprehension difficulty. Journal of Cognitive Science 9(2). 159–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Dependency grammar from theory to practice. Beijing: Science Press.Google Scholar
MacLeish, Andrew. 1969. The Middle English subject-verb cluster. Mouton: The Hague. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maddison, Wayne P., Peter E. Midford & Sarah P. Otto. 2007. Estimating a binary character’s effect on speciation and extinction. Systematic Biology 56(5). 701–710. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maslova, Elena. 2000. A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals. Linguistic Typology 4(3). 307–333. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maurits, Luke & Thomas L. Griffiths. 2014. Tracing the roots of syntax with Bayesian phylogenetics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(37). 13576–13581. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McDonough, Colleen, Lulu Song, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff & Robert Lannon. 2011. An image is worth a thousand words: Why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning. Developmental Science 14(2). 181–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mel'čuk, Igor. 1988. Dependency syntax: Theory and practice. Albany: State University Press of New York.Google Scholar
Miller, D. Gary. 1975. Indo-European: VSO, SOV, SVO or all three. Lingua 371. 31–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Molnár, Valéria & Jorunn Hetland. 2001. Informationsstruktur und Reliefgebung. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard Konig, Wulf Oesterreicher, and Wolfgang Raible (ed.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook, vol. 2:2, 617–633. De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Napoli, Donna Jo & Rachel Sutton-Spence. 2014. Order of the major constituents in sign languages: Implications for all language. Frontiers in Psychology 51. 376. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan & Ann Taylor. 2008. The loss of OV order in the history of English. In Ans van Kemenade & Los Bettelou (eds.), The handbook of the history of English, 249–278. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Revell, Liam J. 2012. phytools: An R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods in Ecology and Evolution 3(2). 217–223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Riesberg, Sonja, Kurt Malcher & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 2019. How universal is agent-first? Evidence from symmetrical voice languages. Language 95(3). 523–561. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ross, John R. 1973. The penthouse principle and the order of constituents. In Claudia Corum, T Cedric Smith-Stark & Ann Weiser (eds.), You take the high node and I’ll take the low node, 397–422. Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Salaberri, Iker. 2018. On the relationship between clause type and syntactic change: A corpus-based cross-linguistic study. Abstract presented at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Tallinn.
Sasse, Hans-Jurgen. 2006. Theticity. In Giuliano Bernini & Marcia L. Schwartz (eds.), Pragmatic organization of discourse in the languages of Europe, 255–308. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sauppe, Sebastian. 2017. Symmetrical and asymmetrical voice systems and processing load: Pupillometric evidence from sentence production in Tagalog and German. Language 93(2). 288–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Statisticat & LLC. 2021. LaplacesDemon: Complete Environment for Bayesian Inference. R package version 16.1.6. [URL]
Stockwell, Robert & Donka Minkova. 1991. Subordination and word order change in the history of English. In Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English syntax, 367–408. Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stone, Gerald. 1993. Sorbian. In Bernard Comrie & Greville G. Corbett (eds.), The Slavonic languages, 593–685. London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Temperley, David. 2007. Minimization of dependency length in written English. Cognition 105(2). 300–333. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Temperley, David & Daniel Gildea. 2017. Minimizing syntactic dependency lengths: Typological/cognitive universal? Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1). 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomlin, R. S. 1986. Basic word order: Functional principles. Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Trips, Carola. 2002. From OV to VO in Early Middle English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vennemann, Theo. 1974. Topics, subjects, and word order: from SXV to SVX via TVX. In John Anderson & Charles Jones (eds.), Historical linguistics, 339–76. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
. 1975. An explanation of drift. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Word order and word order change, 267–305. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wang, Luming, Mathias Schlesewsky, Balthasar Bickel & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2010. The influence of topicality on Chinese word order processing. Abstract presented at the 23rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. New York.
Wang, Luming, Matthias Schlesewsky, Balthasar Bickel & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. 2009. Exploring the nature of the ‘subject’-preference: Evidence from the online comprehension of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Language and Cognitive Processes 241. 1180–1226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Widmer, Manuel, Sandra Auderset, Johanna Nichols, Paul Widmer & Balthasar Bickel. 2017. NP recursion over time: Evidence from Indo-European. Language 93(4). 799–826. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena, Taras Zakharko, Lennart Bierkandt, Fernando Zuniga & Balthasar Bickel. 2016. Decomposing hierarchical alignment: Co-arguments as conditions on alignment and the limits of referential hierarchies as explanations in verb agreement. Linguistics 541. 531–561. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yang, Charles D. 2000. Internal and external forces in language change. Language Variation and Change 12(3). 231–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zeman, Daniel et al. 2021. Universal Dependencies 2.9. LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. [URL]
Zhou, Kevin & Claire Bowern. 2015. Quantifying uncertainty in the phylogenetics of Australian numeral systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 2821. 20151278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ebert, Christian, Balthasar Bickel & Paul Widmer
2024. Areal and phylogenetic dimensions of word order variation in Indo-European languages. Linguistics DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.