Ho cannot hear speech and have no exposure to a conventionalized sign language. The constituent order of homesign systems has been reported to be robustly SV and OV, across different children and across multiple cultures (Goldin-Meadow Mylander, 1998; Goldin-Meadow, y ek, Sancar, Mylander, 2008). However, this research does not typically distinguish between reversible and non-reversible events, making it difficult to know whether their behavior is consistent with the patterns observed in elicited pantomime. Moreover, much of the linguistic research on homesign focuses on young children, who typically refer to people and things by pointing (Goldin-Meadow Feldman, 1977). These pointing gestures are very different from the more embodied kinds of gestures that our adult participants typically produced, and may only represent an Monocrotaline biological activity initial stage of homesign development. Coppola (2002) followed 3 adult homesigners for several years, and found that their systems often involved more embodied representations of people and enacted representations of action, just as we observed in elicited pantomime. At one point, she asked these adult homesigners used to describe both reversible and non-reversible events and found that, in all three cases, semantic reversibility led to changes in constituent order. Two of the homesigners used primarily SOV for non-reversible events, but avoided it for reversible events, with one preferring OSV and the other preferring SVO. This pattern is strikingly similar to what we observed in elicited pantomime. The third homesigner showed the opposite pattern, preferring SVO for non-reversible events, and SOV for reversible events. However, unlike the other two, his use of constituent order varied over the years, making it difficult to draw 5-BrdUMedChemExpress BRDU conclusions from any one sample of his homesign. At the very least, these data strongly suggest that adult homesigners do use different constituent orders to describe reversible and non-reversible events. These observations lead naturally to the question of whether natural spoken languages exhibit differential word orders for reversible and non-reversible events. Such patterns are often overlooked by formal analyses of language grammars, which tend to focus on what is possible in a language, rather than what is most common. However, both typological and psycholinguistic research finds that animacy can influence constituent order in natural spoken languages. For example, many languages in which word order is typically flexible (e.g. Russian, Japanese, Korean, Hindi) have fewer permissible options when both agent and patient are human: a phenomenon known as word-order freezing (for a review, see Lee, 2001). In addition, animacy still affects constituent order choice even when a grammar permits multiple options (Branigan, Pickering, Tanaka, 2008). It is therefore possible that as a language undergoes a change in constituent order, it passes through a phase where speakers tend to use SVO to describe reversible events while still preferring SOV for nonreversible events. We presently lack direct evidence for this process; however, phenomena such as these have received little study, relative to the large body of work classifying languages according to their dominant order. We hope that future work in language description will give greater consideration to the potential impact of animacy on constituent order, thereby providing evidence that either supports or refutes the present hypothesis.Ho cannot hear speech and have no exposure to a conventionalized sign language. The constituent order of homesign systems has been reported to be robustly SV and OV, across different children and across multiple cultures (Goldin-Meadow Mylander, 1998; Goldin-Meadow, y ek, Sancar, Mylander, 2008). However, this research does not typically distinguish between reversible and non-reversible events, making it difficult to know whether their behavior is consistent with the patterns observed in elicited pantomime. Moreover, much of the linguistic research on homesign focuses on young children, who typically refer to people and things by pointing (Goldin-Meadow Feldman, 1977). These pointing gestures are very different from the more embodied kinds of gestures that our adult participants typically produced, and may only represent an initial stage of homesign development. Coppola (2002) followed 3 adult homesigners for several years, and found that their systems often involved more embodied representations of people and enacted representations of action, just as we observed in elicited pantomime. At one point, she asked these adult homesigners used to describe both reversible and non-reversible events and found that, in all three cases, semantic reversibility led to changes in constituent order. Two of the homesigners used primarily SOV for non-reversible events, but avoided it for reversible events, with one preferring OSV and the other preferring SVO. This pattern is strikingly similar to what we observed in elicited pantomime. The third homesigner showed the opposite pattern, preferring SVO for non-reversible events, and SOV for reversible events. However, unlike the other two, his use of constituent order varied over the years, making it difficult to draw conclusions from any one sample of his homesign. At the very least, these data strongly suggest that adult homesigners do use different constituent orders to describe reversible and non-reversible events. These observations lead naturally to the question of whether natural spoken languages exhibit differential word orders for reversible and non-reversible events. Such patterns are often overlooked by formal analyses of language grammars, which tend to focus on what is possible in a language, rather than what is most common. However, both typological and psycholinguistic research finds that animacy can influence constituent order in natural spoken languages. For example, many languages in which word order is typically flexible (e.g. Russian, Japanese, Korean, Hindi) have fewer permissible options when both agent and patient are human: a phenomenon known as word-order freezing (for a review, see Lee, 2001). In addition, animacy still affects constituent order choice even when a grammar permits multiple options (Branigan, Pickering, Tanaka, 2008). It is therefore possible that as a language undergoes a change in constituent order, it passes through a phase where speakers tend to use SVO to describe reversible events while still preferring SOV for nonreversible events. We presently lack direct evidence for this process; however, phenomena such as these have received little study, relative to the large body of work classifying languages according to their dominant order. We hope that future work in language description will give greater consideration to the potential impact of animacy on constituent order, thereby providing evidence that either supports or refutes the present hypothesis.
