It has often been argued that languages with no morphological marking of core arguments (referred to here as zero-marking languages) should prefer SVO word order. This correlation is tested here by studying the effects of word order, genealogical relatedness, and areal diffusion on the distribution of zero marking with multiple logistic regression. The possible confounding areal and genealogical factors are studied in multiple ways. The results, based on data from 848 languages, suggest that zero marking (morphological simplicity) correlates with SVO (syntactic simplicity), regardless of its areally and genealogically biased distribution. It is argued that this word order preference is affected by functional motivations and language contact.
2016. An Experimental Approach to Basic Word Order in Turkish Intransitives. Psychology of Language and Communication 20:1 ► pp. 73 ff.
ARIK, Engin
2020. Türk İşaret Dili’nde Sözdizime Deneysel Bir Yaklaşım. Bilig :94 ► pp. 75 ff.
Bickel, Balthasar
2011. Statistical modeling of language universals. Linguistic Typology 15:2
Bickel, Balthasar
2017. Areas and Universals. In The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, ► pp. 40 ff.
Guzmán Naranjo, Matías & Laura Becker
2022. Statistical bias control in typology. Linguistic Typology 26:3 ► pp. 605 ff.
Hall, Matthew L., Victor S. Ferreira & Rachel I. Mayberry
2014. Investigating Constituent Order Change With Elicited Pantomime: A Functional Account of SVO Emergence. Cognitive Science 38:5 ► pp. 943 ff.
Hall, Matthew L., Rachel I. Mayberry & Victor S. Ferreira
2013. Cognitive constraints on constituent order: Evidence from elicited pantomime. Cognition 129:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Levshina, Natalia
2020. Efficient trade-offs as explanations in functional linguistics: some problems and an alternative proposal. Revista da ABRALIN► pp. 1 ff.
Levshina, Natalia
2021. Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Li, Wenchao & Haitao Liu
2024. Complexity trade-off in morphosyntactic module: suggestions from Japanese dialects. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 60:2 ► pp. 159 ff.
Pijpops, Dirk & Eva Zehentner
2022. How redundant is language really? Agent-recipient disambiguation across time and space. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1
Roberts, Seán G, Anton Killin, Angarika Deb, Catherine Sheard, Simon J Greenhill, Kaius Sinnemäki, José Segovia-Martín, Jonas Nölle, Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Archie Humphreys-Balkwill, Hannah Little, Christopher Opie, Guillaume Jacques, Lindell Bromham, Peeter Tinits, Robert M Ross, Sean Lee, Emily Gasser, Jasmine Calladine, Matthew Spike, Stephen Francis Mann, Olena Shcherbakova, Ruth Singer, Shuya Zhang, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Christian Kliesch, Ewan Thomas-Colquhoun, Hedvig Skirgård, Monica Tamariz, Sam Passmore, Thomas Pellard & Fiona Jordan
2020. CHIELD: the causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database. Journal of Language Evolution 5:2 ► pp. 101 ff.
Sinnemäki, Kaius
2014. Cognitive processing, language typology, and variation. WIREs Cognitive Science 5:4 ► pp. 477 ff.
Sinnemäki, Kaius
2020. Linguistic system and sociolinguistic environment as competing factors in linguistic variation: A typological approach. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 6:2
Sinnemäki, Kaius & Francesca Di Garbo
2018. Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity. Frontiers in Psychology 9
Yan, Jianwei & Haitao Liu
2024. Basic word order typology revisited: a crosslinguistic quantitative study based on UD and WALS. Linguistics Vanguard 9:1 ► pp. 73 ff.
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