The cross-linguistic prevalence of SOV and SVO word
orders reflects the sequential and
hierarchical representation of action in Broca’s area
David Kemmerer
Purdue University
Despite
the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the language sciences, so far
relatively little effort has been devoted to exploring potential connections
between typology and neuroscience. To illustrate some of the
insights that can be gained from pursuing such an integration, this paper
focuses on one of the most well established and frequently cited typological
generalizations, namely that in the vast majority of human languages, the basic
word order is either SOV (about 48%) or SVO (about 41%). It has been
suggested that these strong tendencies can be explained cognitively in terms of
the prototypical transitive action scenario, in which an animate agent acts
forcefully on an inanimate patient to induce a change of state. Two
forms of iconicity are especially relevant: first, because the agent
is at the head of the causal chain that affects the patient, subjects usually
precede objects; and second, because it is the agent’s action, rather than the
agent per se, that changes the state of the patient, verbs and objects are
usually adjacent. The purpose of this paper is to show that this
account converges with, and hence receives further support from, recent research
on how actions are represented in the brain. Specifically, several
lines of evidence are reviewed which suggest that Broca's
area plays a pivotal role in schematically representing the sequential and
hierarchical organization of goal-directed bodily movements, not only when they
are performed and perceived in the real world, but also when they are
symbolically expressed as transitive clauses. Taken together, these
findings support the hypothesis that the most cross-linguistically prevalent
word order patterns reflect the most natural ways of linearizing and nesting
the core conceptual components of actions in Broca's
area.