Subject side parameter

For example, in the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), 76% of the languages in their sample Specifier-first (either SOV or SVO).

[1] First developed in the late 1960s and later introduced in his Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), Noam Chomsky presented his work on principles and parameters.

The WALS database indicates that languages with the order subject-object-verb (SOV) and subject-verb-object (SVO) are overwhelmingly the most numerous.

Similarly, in two well-known studies done by Li and Thompson (1975), it is suggested that SOV word order codes definite object[clarification needed].

(Lee, 2007 p. 3 (3a))Above, the subject na comes at the beginning of the sentence, the object Yenghi follows and then the verb po-ass-e comes at the end.

The rarity of this word order may be occur as a result of this language occurring when V-fronting moves the verb out of the verb phrase in the SVO structure and places it before the subject[9] This modification disrupts the underlying X-bar structure and thus makes VSO rarer due to the complexity of grammar.

Here is an example of the order in which someone would sign:[15] One possibility that can explain the rarity of these languages, is that, in general, objects do not occur in initial position often.

Specifically, the movement is phrasal fronting as proposed by Jessica Coon in her paper focusing on Ch'ol, but it is very likely to be used to explain other languages having VOS word order.

[19] This proposal is a result of moving the verb phrase to a higher position in a syntactic tree form.

The following example is from Hixkaryana:[21] kanafishyanimnohe-caught-itbiryekomoboykana yanimno biryekomofish he-caught-it boy'The boy caught a fish.'

[22] These two pieces of evidence show that the object is followed by a verb and the subject occurs in final position.

On the other hand, Laura Kalin proposed there are three factors to make movement occur in the sentence structure: focus, contrastive topic and wh-questions.

There are research and studies been done in order to account for such phenomenon; a few of the possible reasons are as follows: In Matthew Hall, Victor Ferreira and Rachel Mayberry's paper,[24] they argue that because there are three constraints — being efficient, keeping subjects before objects, avoiding SOV for reversible events — that the SVO word order can allow its users, it becomes more popular than others.

Moreover, they clam that when gestural consistency and a passive interlocutor were both present, the SVO word order will appear significantly.

Meanwhile, according to Luke Maurits, Amy Perfors and Daniel Navarro,[25] the reason for object-initial languages to be less common than other word orders could be explained by the effects of Uniform Information Density (UID).

They suggest that "object-first word orders lead to the least uniform information density in all three of [their] estimated event distributions"(Maurits et al., 2010, p. 7), and was therefore least common.

For example, the dominant word order in Mandarin Chinese and German shifted from SVO to SOV.