*** Note unusual room ***

Tuesday 16th September, 11am – 12:30, Lecture theatre 5, 7 Bristo Square

Marieke Schouwstra

Basic word order: from natural order to convention in silent gesture

Interest in the origins of basic word order in human language has increased dramatically over the last five or six years. I will present my contribution to this area and describe experimental work in which adult participants communicate about simple events using only gesture, both alone and in dyadic interaction.

The alone-condition leads to conditioning of word order on the semantic structure of the event that is described: extensional events give rise to SOV word order, while intensional events result in SVO word order (Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014). These two orders arise independently of the dominant order of the participants’ native language, and I will claim that they represent naturalness: they are cognitively the most intuitive way to impose linear structure on information.

I have also investigated the behaviour of the two natural word orders when they are used in dyadic interaction to observe the effect of naive participants communicating repeatedly using only gesture. I will focus on the emergence of linguistic conventions, and discuss the dynamics of this process by looking at the influence of naturalness, regularisation, and the relative frequency of the events being communicated.

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