Rerent properties and word order in emerging communication systems
Fiona Kirton The University of Edinburgh
Wednesday, 30.09.2020
15:00 – 15:30
Room: [virtual Zoom talk]
Why do languages look the way they do? This question lies at the core of much of linguistics research, and answering it can shine a light on the relationship between individual cognitive biases and linguistic structure. One area that has attracted particular attention is basic word order. Many languages exhibit a fixed or dominant ordering of subject (S), object (O), and verb (V); it has been suggested that SOV is the natural ordering of entities in an event, and the default order used by all newly emerging languages. A growing body of research has investigated this question using the silent gesture paradigm in which participants describe events using only gesture and no speech. This work has uncovered a range of factors that influence the way people convey information about events in the absence of linguistic conventions, challenging the view that there is a single natural order. One particularly fruitful line of work has focused on the relationship between animacy and word order, and a number of hypotheses have emerged that seek to explain the nature of this relationship.
In this thesis, I present a number of experiments that build on this work to investigate how properties of individual referents influence word order choices in emerging communication systems. Using a range of experimental approaches, I investigated three proposed drivers of word order variation: salience, modality, and communication. The results of this work support the hypothesis that the salience of referents is a key factor in shaping word order in emerging communication systems. However, the findings were inconclusive about the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship. I suggest that further work is required to better understand the contribution of factors such as modality and native language interference in experimental settings. I also highlight the need for further research to understand how language producers negotiate the communicative challenge of accurately conveying information about events in which the role of referents is ambiguous.