Subject - Object - Verb

[Jayhawker Soule]

From Science Daily:

When Using Gestures, Rules Of Grammar Remain The Same

ScienceDaily (July 7, 2008) — The mind apparently has a consistent way of ordering an event that defies the order in which subjects, verbs, and objects typically appear in languages, according to research at the University of Chicago.

< -- snip -- >

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. They also gave another 40 speakers of the same languages transparencies to assemble after watching the video sequences. Some of the videos portrayed real people and others animated toys that represented a variety of sentence types: a girl waves, a duck moves to a wheelbarrow, a woman twists a knob and a girl gives a flower to man.

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.

I'm not sure why, but I find it interesting that the 'natural' ordering differs from my verbal ordering. It reminds me a bit of Reverse Polish Notation ...

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Hmm...

I got to thinking about the race marshal hand signals I use. Most racing discussions by hand signal are subject-verb (e.g. "car 10 is smoking" would be "car 10", "smoking") or imperative-style verb-object (e.g. "check car 10" would be "check", "car 10"), but when we use all three together, normally we use subject-verb-object order (e.g. "car 10 is dumping gas" would be "car 10", "dumping", "gas").

The only exception to this is questions, where the fact that it's a question, and therefore the implicit subject, comes at the end, e.g. "what car is dumping gas?" would be "dumping", "gas", "what/who?"

Hmm... now that I think about it, the signals for "what car is dumping gas?" would be identical to the signals for "is someone dumping gas?" I guess the meaning is more like "dumping gas... question?" Hopefully the person you're communicating with can tell the difference by context.

[stephenw]

In native signers there is mostly symmetrical activation of the left and right hemispheres when signing. In speech activation is mainly in the left hemisphere. Maybe that's why?

[Jaiket]

Is this perhaps related to the Universal Grammar that we all, allegedly, have?

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by Jaiket

Is this perhaps related to the Universal Grammar that we all, allegedly, have?

I think it would corroborate the notion of an innate universal grammar.