From SOV to SVO: In search of cognitive forces driving the historical change from Subject-Object-Verb to Subject-Verb-Object in main clauses of Dutch and German

In modern Dutch and German, main clauses have Subject-Verb-Object as basic word order (“Verb-second”, V2) but subordinate clauses have Subject-Object-Verb (“Verb-final”, Vf). In older forms of both languages, standard word order was SOV in all clause types. According to recent suggestions, perceptual/cognitive processing factors may have contributed to this historical development. Golden-Meadow et al. (PNAS, 2008) suggest SOV is the natural order of human languages generally, including signed languages. This raises the question why many languages have SVO as default order (e.g. English). Gibson et al. (Psych.Sci, in press) propose a perceptual explanation based on “language users’ sensitivity to the possibility of noise corrupting the linguistic signal.” E.g., when in “girl kicks boy” (SVO) one of the nouns is lost due to noise, the listener can still reconstruct one thematic role: actor or patient; but in “girl boy kicks” (SOV), such a deletion renders both thematic roles unrecoverable.