9 Rhythmic patterns cue word order

Human language can be construed as a system of rules that governs the organization of the words of a language to convey meaning. In most languages, the basic ordering of words in an overt linear sequence is determined by fundamental syntactic rules of organization (Baker 2001). The basic word order shows language-specific variations. For example, while in some languages, like English or Greek, direct objects (O) follow verbs (V), in others, like Hindi or Turkish, objects precede the verbs (Greenberg 1963; Comrie 1981). It has been observed that the basic VO or OV order of a language captures major generalizations about the ordering of other words and phrases in that language (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992). However, the variation among OV and VO languages—in total about 86% of the languages of the world (Dryer 2005)1—presents a problem for acquisition. Given a pair of words X-Y, how is the young learner to determine whether this represents a VO or an OV case, before the knowledge of words? In this chapter, we consider the hypothesis that the different word orders are manifested as different rhythmic patterns in spoken languages.