Cognitive Factors Affecting the Prevalence of SOV and SVO Word Orders

It is a typological observation in more than 90% of languages where the basic word order is either subject–verb–object (SVO) or subject–object–verb (SOV). Functional typologists believe that the prevalence of these two orders; in which the subject precedes the two other elements, and the verb and the object are contiguous is due to the functions of language in the real world. Hence, the two principles of subject salience and verb-object contiguity have been proposed. The typological explanations put forward for these two principles hold that transitive sentences of a language have come into existence as a result of the encoding of the prototypical transitive action scenario. In such a scenario, subject salience is a result of the fact that the transitive action scenario is started by the doer of the activity. Also, because of the tight causal relationship between the activity and its receiver, the linguistic counterparts of these two elements, too, tend to be contiguous. Since functional pressures can only be manifested in language through human cognition, the present paper looks at the cognitive processes involved in the cross-linguistic prevalence of the afore-mentioned word orders.