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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 159–184

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Chapter 9
Deriving OSV order in Cena, an emerging sign language of Brazil

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.09sto
Abstract
We discuss the word order OSV found in Cena, an emerging sign language of Brazil, in transitive clauses with two animate arguments, as found in elicited production tasks with native signers. We explain the presence of this typologically rare word order in terms of the role-conflict hypothesis (Hall et al 2013), which observes the presence of first-person singular subject agreement morphology on verbs whose subject is not third person, and propose that the order OSV, with the subject closer to the verb, guarantees a local binder for the variable that this first-person morphology requires. We argue that the object-first order is the result of object shift of animate objects to a higher position than the subject.
Article outline
  • 1.OSV orders: Typologically, in gesture, and in young sign languages
  • 2.Background on Cena and the Haifa Clips Task
  • 3.Results of the Cena task by verb class and cohort
    • 3.1Intransitive events
    • 3.2Transitive nonreversible events
    • 3.3Transitive reversible events
    • 3.4Ditransitive events
  • 4.Discussion of communicative-pressure accounts
    • 4.1Role-conflict and body-as-subject
    • 4.2Noisy channel and human-first accounts
  • 5.Animate object shift ensures local binding of the subject variable
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
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