A number of languages have flexible word orders where the order of the constituents isnt determined by syntactic roles, such as subject or object, but by some other principle. In some lgs the order is determined by semantic factors such as animacy, in others by various pragmatic factors such as topicality or focus, or information structure,

Yet others the word order is determined by grammatical factors such as aspecT. In Navaho for ex the order of the subject and object is dependent on the relevant NP’S position on the animacy hieararcy according to the following principles:

HUMAN>ANIMALS>(large>medıum>small)>inscts>natural forces>plants>inanimate objects>abstract notions

The ranking thus not only takes animacy into account, but, with animals, also size. In other words a bigger animal ranks higher than a smaller one. The hierarcy appears such that:

Navaho (Na-dene(Athapaskan): USA

A) D’oola dib’e yiyiinssx Bull sheep killed S o v ‘‘The bull killed the sheep.’’ B) * dib’e doola biyiisx’i sheep bull killed (uyenchi

1996:124) C) * Toisn’n’a na’astoos’i

yishish bee mouse stung ‘‘ The bee stung the mouse’’.

D) Na’astoos’i tois’na bishish

Mouse bee stung o s v

Cayuga (ıroquian):USA A) Katsihva’ kihsa:s hammer 1SG. SEEK O V ‘I am looking for a

hammer.’ (said in shop with no a particular hammer in mind).

B) To: ti’ nika:no:’ ne:kye katsihwa’

How then so.it.costs. This hammer.

How much does this hammer cost?

(indicating specific hammer)

Mithun1992:28) In these kind of languages it is

only accurate to label it flexible word order if the criterion is the position of constituents according to grammatical relations, since they are only flexible in the sense that constituents with various syntactic roles may appear in diffrent positions.

However, Word order in the above mentioned lgs may be said to be rigid with respect to other criteria, such as animacy, pragmatic roles or whatever else iti is determines the position of the constituents.

WORD ORDER IN SIGN LANGUAGES

We have seen that it is less than straightforward to determine the basic word order for spoken lgs. In a sense, it is even less straightforward for signed lgs.

This is partly because it is less common in signed lgs than in spoken lgs to have clauses containiing two overt nominal arguments.

In fact it seems to be very common indeed for all known sign lgs to allow clauses that only contain the verb, where the arguments are covert and only implied through context. This especially true for clauses with pronıminal arguments but also nominal arguments may be covert.

Nevertheless, while the word order is typically less rigid in signed lgs a basic word order has been determined for a number of sign lgs. For ex ST is SVO while DGS is SOV.

ST (Sign language: Sweeden)

DRIVER WASH CAR S V O ‘‘The driver washed the

car.’’ (Ahlgren and Bergman

2006:43)

DGS (Sign Language in Germany)

MAN BOOK BUY S O V ‘‘The man buys a book.’’ While there are no large

sclae surveys of the word order in sign lgs yet map 10.1 gives an overview of 30 sign lgs.

The word order of the sign lg is independent from the word order of the spoken lg in te area.

Thus BSL has no dominant order, while spoken English has SVO as its dominant order and while LSA in Argentina has SVO Word order, spoken Spanish has SVO as its dominant word order.