Word Order of Hixkaryana

Joseph B. wrote:

>>Is there really a human language somewhere on the planet
>>that's OVS?  Where?   How widely spoken?
>>
>>
>
>Hixkaryana, a Carib language language spoken by about 500 people in Brasil.
>
>
 Hixkaryana may be a bad example. It's true that a good proportion of
the transitive clauses with two explicit arguments exhibit order OVS,
but not appreciably more than a couple of other orders (since Hixkaryana
is fairly free word order wise). Transitive clauses with two explicit
arguments also tend to be pretty rare, making it even more difficult to
ascertain the basic word order.
 IIRC, the argument that Hixkaryana is OVS comes not from the fact that
OVS is by far the most common order, but rather that the people studying
the language argue that OVS is the least pragmatically marked (just like
Basque, while having free word order based on topicality and focus, has
SOV as the least marked order). The difficulty with this though is that,
since clauses with two arguments are rare, *all* such clauses are fairly
marked.
 I think the debate about whether Hixkaryana and related languages are
truly OVS is still out. I suspect that a better principle for their word
order is the (amazingly common in diverse unrelated languages):

new or unpredictable information first
old or predictable information last

Since transitive subjects tend to be highly topical and recently
mentioned, and transitive objects tend to be new or non-topical, this
would produce OVS as a fairly unmarked order. However, since Hixkaryana
allows dropping of topical arguments, and transitive subjects are
generally topical, this would also mean that when transitive subjects
are mentioned they are generally marked and fronted, producing SOV or
SVO fairly commonly in transitive clauses with two arguments. And this
is, IIRC, what is found in Hixkaryana.
 I read a PDF a while ago comparing frequencies of different orders in
Hixkaryana texts but I can't find it now...