Re: Natural Order of Events

--- On Thu, 11/6/08, Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> wrote:

> From: Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
>
>
> The null hypothesis is: The order of events in the gestural
> "retelling" will
> mimic their grammatical order in the native language. Of
> course you want
> unambiguous arguments and predicates; you want to be able
> to interpret the
> gestural "utterances". The real question is: Why
> are they put in the order
> AGENT PATIENT ACTION, even when the native language
> (English) would have
> them as AGENT ACTION PATIENT? Since that order contradicts
> the null
> hypothesis, it requires explanation.
Anyone who has played charades realizes how ambiguous gestures can be. If, on the
other hand, I say "John hit...", the word "hit" is not very ambiguous, and
already conjures up a preliminary picture of the event, even before we know the
target of the hitting action.

The need to mention the object first, IMHO, goes up as the ambiguity of the "verb"
goes up. Establishing the object first narrows the possible interpretation of
the verb. Suppose we had only 10 verbs in English, and that one of those verbs,
"glinta", could mean "hit", "drink", "sleep", "become", "sneeze", "sing", and a
dozen other actions.

Now the sentence that begins "John glinta ..." leaves too much up in the air for
too long. The listener doesn't know what to make of "glinta", and that puts a
bigger burden on the mental parser, with more possible pending interpretations
to juggle.

I would think that having such an ambiguous verb would tend to push the object
to the left of the verb just to prevent premature mis-interpretations of
"glinta": "John the ball glinta." Where the object serves to pre-classify the
verb, so that, for example, "glinta = drink" is never even considered by the
mental parser.

From a CONLANG perspective, this implies that a conlang could have very few verbs,
each of which was overloaded with many, many different meanings, as long as SOV
word order narrowed down the verb meaning before the verb was actually
encountered.

--gary