This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb object) languages. It is possible then that the mind is more likely to expect case marking when confronted with a language with SOV word order but not necessarily so if the language has SVO word order. We tested this hypothesis with 54 naive learners of Latin with English as a first language (L1). The participants were divided into two groups. One received a 100-word input treatment in Latin that contained only simple SOV sentences, and the other received the same input treatment except that the word order of the treatment sentences was SVO. After the treatment, a surprise self-paced reading test that contained grammatical and ungrammatical case-marked sentences was administered. Participants read test items that matched the word order of the treatment they received (i.e. SOV learners read SOV sentences, and SVO learners read SOV sentences). Results showed a significant slowing down on ungrammatical sentences for the SOV group but not for the SVO group. However, on a test of basic sentence comprehension in which case marking was the cue to determine who did what to whom, we found no distinction between the groups. We discuss these findings in light of how typological universals work in languages and what they could mean for language acquisition.

Abstract India’s linguistic diversity encompasses twenty-two constitutionally recognized languages, each characterized by rich morphology, extensive inflectional properties, and relatively free word order. Among these, Dogri, an Indo-Aryan language with a Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) structure, stands out for its use of postpositions instead of prepositions to convey spatial relations, a feature that sets it apart from languages like English and Russian. This study explores the syntactic and semantic structures of postpositional locative expressions in Dogri, a language that remains significantly underexplored and underdocumented. The research focuses on two primary objectives: (1) to identify and classify various one-word and two-word locative case markers, both free and bound, that exhibit polysemous relationships in Dogri; and (2) to analyze how these markers semantically and syntactically link nouns or pronouns with locative expressions, enriching sentence meaning. Data were collected through a random survey of 90 native Dogri speakers from Kathua, Jammu, and Reasi districts in Jammu and Kashmir, with 45 participants responding to pictorial questionnaires and 45 participating in interviews. The analysis examines spatial, directional, and temporal locative relations, differentiating static positional references from directional shifts. The findings reveal that Dogri locative markers are predominantly postpositional, with their functions marked through inflectional affixes. This study offers valuable insights into Dogri’s unique linguistic features and contributes to understanding its typological placement within the Indo-Aryan language family.

example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions (some, such a modern Persian, are unusual, being SOV but using prepositions In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. S… Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions explicitly mark the relationships of noun phrases to the other sentence constituents. Word order in Hindustani does not usually encode grammatical functions. Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in a sentence is usually the topic, which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle "to" (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は (wa). Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows: