In this article, we focus on constituent order in Serbian Sign Language (srpski znakovni jezik or SZJ), a largely under-documented sign language (SL). The main research question of this study addresses the manner in which the predicate and the nominal phrases in single active declarative clauses are ordered. More specifically, the goals of this study are to determine the position of a predicate with respect to its arguments in declarative clauses of three types, i.e. non-reversible, reversible, and locative, and to get an indication of the role the factors that have been claimed to influence constituent order in other SLs play in SZJ. While the topic of constituent order in declarative clauses has largely featured in international SL research (e.g., Brennan & Turner 1994; Johnston et al. 2007; Napoli & Sutton-Spence 2014), this is the first comprehensive study on constituent order in SZJ.

Typological studies that focus on constituent order in (sign) languages can roughly be divided into two groups. Criteria for such a division are based on a theoretical orientation which has implications for the basic unit of analysis, and the nature of relations that hold between the core constituents, that is, whether the relations are best described as grammatical, semantic, pragmatic or pragmatic-semantic.

The first group of studies examine simple declarative ditransitive clauses by describing constituent order according to the grammatical relations of subject, object, and verb (see Napoli & Sutton-Spence 2014 for an overview). Most studies in this group take a formal linguistic approach and as such make two assumptions: first, that a clause is a fundamental grammatical unit in discourse, and second, that the subject constitutes a universal grammatical role.

The second group of studies that base their analyses on a cognitive/functional approach question the universality of grammatical relations (Dryer 1997; Croft 2001) and take a provisional view of the traditional notion of a clause. In cognitive/functional approaches, constituent order tends to be described in terms of information structure, using notions such as topic-comment (Li & Thompson 1976), focus-background (Givón 2001), and given-new (Prince 1981), or in terms of conceptual relations (Croft 2001). Thus, a major issue on constituent order within a cognitive/functional framework which SL studies have tried to address is the nature of relations between core constituents. Anderson (1978), for example, claims that constituent order in American Sign Language (ASL) does not rely on grammatical relations, but on information structure. Research into Danish Sign Language (DTS) similarly suggests that the grammatical role of subject is absent from DTS (Engberg-Pedersen 2002), while in a recent corpus-based study on clause constituents in Auslan (the majority SL in Australia), Johnston (2019a) proposed that Auslan is a pragmatic-semantic constituent order language lacking grammatical relations. Pertaining to the issue of describing core constituents in SLs are the phenomena of core argument omission, and simultaneity, both of which raise the question of the appropriate unit of analysis in constituent order studies. Ferrara (2012), for example, reported a high number of verb-only and verbless attributive clauses in her Auslan dataset consisting of free conversations and narratives. When a core argument is omitted, the information about the participants of an action and/or about the action itself has been suggested to be a result of the referential cohesion and the context of the utterance (Johnston & Schembri 2007; McKee et al. 2011). Cohesion in SLs includes the meaningful placement of signs in space whereby an association between a location and an absent referent is established, for instance. Another discourse feature that plays an important role in participant identification, especially in clauses without overt core arguments, is constructed action (CA) or enactment (Cormier et al. 2015), which is a ‘showing’ strategy as opposed to ‘telling’ in a narrow linguistic sense (Cuxac 1999). Thus, instances of (S)V(O) or (S)V clauses need to be distinguished from SVO with all core constituents overtly expressed in a clearly linear sequence. Furthermore, as depicting signs in, for example, SOV clauses can occur in a simultaneous construction with core constituents simultaneously expressed, it is important that this type of an apparent SOV clause is differentiated from an SOV clause where each constituent is overtly expressed in sequential order (see Johnston et al. 2007; Hodge 2013). Simultaneous constructions, core argument omission, and varying constituent order has thus made SL researchers question the appropriate unit of analysis in constituent order studies. Johnston (2019b: 57), like Hodge (2013), segments SL discourse into clause-like units (CLU) “in recognition of the dual ‘tell’ or ‘show’ strategy approach apparently exploited by Auslan signers”. These CLUs as the “basic articulatory chunks of propositional meaning” are only units of analysis not to be equated with a “traditional grammatical construction of the type ‘clause’” (Johnston 2019b: 57). By examining the varying constituent order in simple declarative transitive clauses, clauses with argument omission, and the interplay between CA and a clause in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL), Jantunen (2008; 2013; 2017) concludes that the clause in its traditional sense may not be the most appropriate unit to be used in FinSL. Instead a prosody-based analysis of spoken language syntax where discourse is segmented into syllables and intonation phrases may be more appropriate for the analysis of FinSL syntax (Jantunen 2008).

There has been other work on SLs that has explored the relations between prosody and syntax. Fenlon et al. (2007), for example, found that native British Sign Language (BSL) signers and non-signers perform similarly when segmenting a BSL narrative using visual cues from prosody that help them identify clausal boundaries reliably. Other research on segmentation and prosody drew on work on spoken languages (SpL) claiming that an intonation unit (IU) frequently aligns with a clause. This alignment in cognitive linguistics is attributed to the demands of face-to-face interaction as “the content of a clause fits naturally in a single window of attention” (Langacker 2008: 482). Consequently, there have been studies approaching SL clausal analysis by trying to account for prosodic contours. In one such study on Auslan, Hodge et al. (2011), investigated the alignment of IUs and CLUs. Their findings suggest that a one-to-one alignment between IUs and CLUs is frequently found in the dataset they analysed.

In another study on French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), Gabarró-López and Meurant (2016) applied the Basic Discourse Unit Model, as proposed for the segmentation of French discourse by Degand and Simon (2009). Gabarró-López and Meurant (2016) proposed that visual prosodic cues, such as eye blinks, short head nods, pauses, and sign holds are important for indicating basic discourse units’ boundaries in LSFB. Johnston (1996), however, suggests that individual prosodic features are not cues to CLUs, but that intonation contours which consist of prosodic features that interact with each other are meaningful in Auslan in the sense that they indicate that an utterance is declarative, interrogative, imperative, negative, or conditional. When this suggestion was investigated empirically in a study by Hodge et al. in 2011, it was found that no “absolute functional values” can be attributed to individual prosodic properties within prosodic contours and that it is important to focus on contours rather than boundaries to gauge the interaction between the two (Ferrara 2012: 73–74). Thus, in following corpus studies by Ferrara (2012) and Hodge (2013), CLUs were identified based on a semantic approach, which is underpinned by the presence or absence of intonation contours.

To summarize, in face-to-face discourse, spoken or signed, where utterances are said to be co-created and negotiated between interactants (Hodge 2013), clause identification is difficult as the identification of factors such as IUs which are found to correspond to single clauses is not as straightforward. The matter of clause delineation is further complicated by factors including simultaneous constructions, and the omission of core arguments.

The previous research on SL constituent order (e.g., Coerts 1994; Hodge 2013; Johnston 2019a) provides the current study with a first working assumption that it is possible to analyse signed utterances from a clause-level perspective. In describing and examining our data, we broadly relied on a cognitive/functional approach while at the same time trying not to force the SL into a (spoken) language model but rather describing it in its own terms (Vermeerbergen 2006). In a functional-typological approach to constituent order, Dryer argues that grammatical relations are unique to every language (Dryer 1997: 140), so the terms subject and object are used in this paper in a semantic sense, equivalent to agent and patient (Dryer 2005: 330). Dryer (1997: 139) further writes that the “similarities among languages can be explained directly in terms of functional and cognitive principles that underlie language and which cause languages to be the way they are”. One such cognitive principle is the Gestalt principle of visual perception, that is, the FIGURE-GROUND principle in which people perceive objects as foregrounded (the FIGURE) or as backgrounded (the GROUND). Because locative clauses in SLs depict objects and movements as located in signing space, the analysis of core constituents in a locative clause in terms of grammatical relations is debatable. Instead, it has been suggested that constituent order in locative clauses is better described in terms of topic-comment (in ASL for example, Anderson 1978) or FIGURE-GROUND (in Turkish Sign Language or TİD for example, Özyürek et al. 2010). A preliminary study on constituent order in SZJ (Raičević et al. 2017) which included a subset of locative clauses showed that SZJ signers use similar strategies reported for locative clauses in other SLs such as placement and movement of signs in the three-dimensional signing space (Vermeerbergen et al. 2007a; Özyürek et al. 2010; Leeson and Saaed 2012). As these visually more specific ways of linguistic encoding of spatial relations in SLs seem to be more adequately described using the notions of FIGURE, GROUND, and LOCATIVE RELATION (Talmy 2003), we will adopt this terminology in our analysis of locative clauses here.

To date, SZJ, the primary language of the Serbian deaf community, has received little scholarly attention, apart from the preliminary study on basic constituent order in SZJ by Raičević et al. (2017). The findings from that study revealed SVO is the most frequent constituent order in non-locative clauses with two arguments, while the most prominent pattern in locative clauses is GROUND-FIGURE-LOCATIVE RELATION.

Polovina and Dimić (2009) investigated grammatical categories in SZJ through elicited data from an unspecified number of deaf signers and hearing bilinguals whose native languages are SZJ and Serbian. The goal of Polovina and Dimić’s study was to determine if there are morphological and syntactic categories in SZJ. Their findings indicate that the clearest example of a morphological category in their data is verbal aspect, and that there is not much evidence of classifier morphemes: “In some sign languages, such as ASL, classifier predicates are mentioned […], that is, verbs with a handshape that has a classifying function […]. We did not find any systematic distribution of such classifier morphemes in SZJ” (Polovina & Dimić 2009: 304; our translation). Another important finding by the authors is that constituent order in many of the clauses is free except in cases when structural ambiguity occurs where constituent order is fixed. Polovina and Dimić (2009: 309) suggest that when it is not possible to distinguish between the roles of the arguments based on the lexical meaning of the signs in a clause, subject before object is obligatory while the position of the verb is free. There is no mention of whether a particular verb type influences constituent order in SZJ. CA and the role of non-manual markers are not discussed. The difference between clauses in (1a) and (1b) is said to be made on syntactic grounds as Polovina and Dimić (2009) observe that the subject must precede the object. Thus, constituent order as an important coding characteristic may be indicative of grammatical relations in SZJ.

Napoli and Sutton-Spence (2014) have so far provided the most elaborate typological overview of issues regarding constituent order focusing on subject, object, and verb, drawing on data from 42 SLs. Just as authors before Napoli and Sutton-Spence, namely Johnston et al. (2007) observe, cross-linguistic comparison is difficult because of different data collection methodologies and different definitions of arguments, phrases, and clauses. Some studies rely on more naturalistic data such as free conversations, while others use picture elicitation tasks or translations of SpL clauses (Van Herreweghe & Vermeerbergen 2012a). The choice of data, however, has been shown to influence constituent order. Engberg-Pedersen (2002), for example, concludes that basic constituent order in clauses with two arguments in DTS is SVO1 or SOV, with SOV possibly being a result of the focusing strategy or a register not influenced by spoken Danish.

Other factors that are claimed to influence constituent order in SLs are the following:

(i) Semantic factors:

Features such as argument reversibility and animacy also appear to be important (Coerts 1994). Based on investigation of young SLs, emerging SLs, and artificial SL experiments Meir et al. (2017) contend that conceptual accessibility in which humans come first determines the order of introduction of arguments in a transitive clause rather than the arguments’ semantic/syntactic role. Therefore, in non-reversible clauses, such as the boy is opening/closing the door the boy is likely to be mentioned first, before the door. While both SVO (e.g., in Croatian Sign Language or HZJ Milković et al. 2006) and SOV (e.g., in Argentine Sign Language or LSA Massone & Curiel 2004, and Flemish Sign Language or VGT Vermeerbergen 1996) have been reported as the preferred constituent order for non-reversible clauses in a number of SLs, other studies have shown that SOV is less strongly preferred than SVO in reversible clauses (Gibson et al. 2013; Hall et al. 2013; Meir et al. 2017). This is ascribed to ambiguity as both human referents are potential subjects. To avoid confusability speakers/signers tend to separate the arguments by the verb (Gibson et al. 2013) as in SVO. The speaker/signer thus takes into account the interlocutor’s perspective and strives to facilitate their comprehension (Hall et al. 2013).

(ii) Discourse-pragmatic factors:

Factors such as topicalization are reported to alter the constituent order in a number of SLs. For example, in LSA it is claimed that the object can precede the subject only if it is topicalized. In such cases, the topic is accompanied by manual and non-manual features typical of the topic, otherwise the order OSV is considered to be ungrammatical (Massone & Curiel 2004). Johnston and Schembri (2006) explored topicalized constituents in Auslan and non-manual signals associated with them. They conclude that the non-manual signals appear to vary and are not obligatory, perhaps reflecting ongoing grammaticalization processes. A similar claim about ongoing grammaticalization of clause external topics into clause internal subjects is reported for FinSL (Jantunen 2008). In possibly the most thorough study of topic-comment structures in SL linguistics, Sze (2015) investigated frequency and robustness of topic prominence in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) according to the characteristics typical for topic prominent languages as discussed by Li and Thompson (1976) and É. Kiss (1995). Sze (2015) found that the non-manual markers usually associated with topics in the SL literature, such as brow raise or head tilts are not consistent nor frequent in HKSL as is usually the case in topic-prominent SpLs with morphological markers. Finally, Sze (2015: 855) proposes that some presence of a prototypical topic-comment construction, i.e. a double-subject construction2 can serve as evidence of topic-prominence in HKSL, but topicalization is not a robust process in HKSL.

Another discourse-pragmatic factor that has been observed to have implications for constituent order is agent backgrounding/defocusing. It has been found in different SLs that a well-attested discourse strategy such as CA may lead to defocusing of the agent by not overtly expressing it. The phenomenon of agent backgrounding/defocusing has most notably been described in ASL (Rankin 2013), FinSL (Nordlund 2019), and Nicaraguan Sign Language (Rissman et al. 2020).

(iii) Iconicity:

It has long been shown that iconicity pervades SL structure, not just in lexical items but also in grammatical structure. Iconicity has been suggested to have an effect on subject drop in German Sign Language (DGS) and Russian Sign Language (RSL) (Oomen & Kimmelman 2019) where verbs articulated on the body such as LOVE licence non-overt subject argument in first-person interpretation only as the body is the natural locus of first person but also a metaphoric location of loving whereas verbs that are produced in neutral space in front of the signer allow all types of null subjects. The subject drop in DGS and RSL is thus, as the authors suggest, partially constrained due to iconicity. Iconically motivated forms of signs, most notably, depicting signs have been shown to influence argument structure of a clause and its transitivity type. Benedicto and Brentari (2004), for example, propose that the handshape of the sign determines the argument structure. In clauses with handling verb signs the object is usually indicated by the sign’s handshape and hence not explicitly mentioned often resulting in transitive SV clauses (Meir et al. 2017).

Features that characterise locative clauses, e.g. first-GROUND-then-FIGURE patterns, the use of simultaneous verb constructions to encode the spatial relations between the GROUND and the FIGURE, are associated with iconicity principles (Özyürek et al. 2010). In short, iconicity is a mechanism that helps signers create a schematic correspondence between their hands in the signing space and locations of the real-world entities (Emmorey 1996). The schematic correspondence in SZJ is illustrated in (2a) and (2b).3

(iv) Modality factors:

Factors that are typical of SLs such as simultaneity, the use of space, and CA may also exert influence on constituent order. Simultaneity is a feature of SLs that distinguishes it from SpLs that mainly order information linearly (Vermeerbergen et al. 2007b). Simultaneous constructions which consist of two simultaneously articulated signs that are placed in space in meaningful reference to each other (Johnston et al. 2007) usually occur clause finally.

The presence of CA and depicting signs has been demonstrated to result in a verb-final order in DTS (Engberg-Pedersen 2002) and VGT (Van Herreweghe & Vermeerbergen 2012b) However, in a study on VGT and South African Sign Language (SASL) Vermeerbergen et al. (2007a) found that a certain subset of imitating verbs such as HUG and PUSH, and lexical verbs co-occurring with CA do not get placed at the end of the utterance when CA refers to the subject rather than to the object.

Some researchers (e.g., Ferrara & Johnston 2014) suggest that CA may make null arguments more likely and thus serve as their only representation. Others (e.g., Jantunen 2017), however, do not analyse CA as an instance of a core argument but rather as contributing to the mental construction of the meaning of the non-overt constituent. CA thus adds a level of simultaneity within a clause. In a recent study, Johnston (2019a) states that CA can co-occur with a single sign or with a group of signs in a clause, across an entire clause or even over several clauses. In (3) from SZJ, we see CA occurring with a verb-only clause WASH.

(v) Verb type and verb modification:

The choice of a verb has been shown to have consequences for the preferred constituent order in different SLs. A tripartite classification of verbs in SLs into plain, agreement and spatial is based on Padden’s proposal (1988). Agreement and spatial verbs mark different types of arguments, animate and locative respectively. The meaningful modification of location and movement in agreement verbs can mark person and number and thus resemble inflectional morphemes in SpLs (Padden 1988). However, while a verb such as LOOK has been shown to consistently mark first person object forms on or near the signer’s body (see Hou & Meier 2018 for a study on ASL), it is not always clear if LOOK marks person or location when it is directed outwards and away from the signer (Johnston & Schembri 2007: 287). This makes the distinction between agreement and spatial verbs problematic. As a result, Liddell (2003) introduced the terms indicating and depicting verbs. Within this framework, studies have reported that there is an interaction between verb position in the clause and the modification of indicating verbs, with verbs in clause final position more likely to exhibit directional alternations (Fenlon et al. 2018). This appears to reflect a general tendency observed in a number of SLs that plain verbs tend to appear in SVO clauses, while modified indicating verbs and depicting verbs tend to occur clause finally. For an overview of verb types and factors that may influence constituent order in some SLs see Table 1 in Appendix.

Based on findings concerning constituent order in other SLs, our research questions include:

Given the research questions above, we will interpret our findings with respect to four possible analyses: a first analysis that will focus on the simple counts regarding the dataset of non-locative clauses and locative clauses, a second, third and fourth analysis that will respectively report on (i) quantitative investigations regarding the transitive, intransitive and verb-only non-locative clauses, (ii) the transitive non-locative clauses with one and two overt arguments, and (iii) the transitive clauses with two overt arguments.

The number of analysed clauses is 810. Approximately two-thirds of the time, participants produced single clause responses while in the remaining one-third the participants’ responses were multi-clausal. We analysed 338 (42%) clauses for the non-reversible state-of-affairs, 272 (33%) for the reversible state-of-affairs and 200 (25%) for the locative state-of-affairs (see Figures 3 and 4). There were twelve singular responses8 for the locative state-of-affairs that were excluded from the analysis. Furthermore, clauses elicited for locative state-of-affairs that had verbs such as EMPTY, SIT, HAVE, etc. were not considered for the purposes of this study as they did not seem to provide spatial or locative information.

A total of 409 (50%) declarative transitive clauses, 76 (9%) intransitive clauses, 125 (15%) verb-only, and 200 (25%) locative clauses constitute the dataset of this study. Of 610 non-locative clauses, 325 (53%) had both arguments overtly expressed, 84 (14%) were transitive clauses with one overt argument, 76 (13%) were intransitive clauses while 125 (20%) were verb-only clauses.

In the following subsections, we present an overview of the findings on constituent order, and constituent order and verb type for each state-of-affairs separately. Section 7 provides a summary of the main findings, and links the findings to the research questions. The diverse nature of constituents and relations between them is addressed in Section 8, followed by a conclusion.

The Volterra drawings were designed and subsequently used by researchers with the intention of eliciting prototypical transitive clauses containing a predicate and two overt arguments that would provide a first indication of (basic) constituent order in a SL. However, the original study as the studies after it showed that even in a relatively controlled experimental setting signers tend to omit arguments. If one were to account for clauses with overt constituents only, one could easily do so, though a significant number of elliptical clauses would be left aside. This kind of approach would have serious implications for the conclusions concerning the nature of the basic unit of analysis, the nature of symbolic relations between the constituents in such a unit and consequently the claim that there is a basic constituent order in a language.

Some of the ‘structurally incomplete’ utterances in the dataset of the present study point at the possible drawbacks with respect to the presentation of the elicitation material that may have affected some of the patterns extracted. It could be that the absence of arguments in the isolated clause BUILD is the result of the fact that it is the action which is the contrasting element (building versus painting) between the two drawings so that mentioning verb is enough for the addressee to know to which drawing the signer is referring (see Vermeerbergen et al. 2007a: 37). However, clauses such as BUILD were produced rarely while clauses with subject and/or object omitted within a multi-clausal string were more common. In such instances and in the absence of conventional marking pragmatic inferencing and the strategy of ‘showing’ using highly iconic structures (Cuxac 1999; 2000) rather than ‘telling’ may play a role. The entrenchment of these iconic structures is a matter of degree (Ferrara 2012; Puupponen 2019; Johnston 2019a): it is possible to distinguish between unconventionalised signs whose meaning is highly context dependent as they do not have a fixed form-meaning pairing (recall instances of CA from this study), and symbolic indexicals that are partly lexicalized such as depicting signs. Even many signs that are conventional but iconic (e.g., PAINT in this study) can index space meaningfully by, for example, directing at a location. This property gives them a possibility of changing their meaning and form indexically which is quite unlike spoken symbolic indexicals (Johnston 2019a).

So, what about a clause in SZJ? It seems from what we could observe in the dataset of this study that signers rely on various representational strategies for producing utterance units, as discussed by Ferrara and Hodge (2018). Some of these units use overt manual signs to identify participants and processes in a clause (cf. Jantunen 2008; Hodge 2013). On the other hand, there are utterance units which use primarily visual representations or enactment and use a mixture of more or less conventionalised symbols: these may not be recognised as clauses in the traditional sense in linguistics. Locative clauses where placement and movement of signs between or towards loci in space are so prevalent, for example, suggest that visual representation of spatial relations may not best be seen as an example of linguistic encoding in the traditional sense i.e. they appear to involve less ‘telling’ than ‘showing’. Iconicity that underlies this ‘showing’ strategy and pervades SL utterances at different levels of organisation together with the lack of conventional marking call for a careful consideration of a ‘constituent’ and a basic unit of analysis in SZJ and point at SZJ as a heterogeneous system (see Schembri 2001), involving a mixture of telling, indicating, and depicting (Ferrara & Hodge 2018). This semiotically diverse grammatical system involves a continuum of conventionality (see Vermeerbergen 2006; Jantunen 2017). Like Ferrara and Hodge (2018), we would argue that any theory of grammar must be able to account for all aspects of the heterogeneous system we see here.

In this article, we have investigated constituent order in declarative clauses in SZJ. The most frequent order is subject before object. In single transitive clauses with two overt arguments, the most frequent and possibly neutral order is SVO. In intransitive clauses, the most frequent pattern is SV. The most frequent ordering in locative clauses is GROUND-first-then-FIGURE. As our data indicate other orders are also attested, although they occur less frequently.

Declarative clauses in SZJ seem to adhere to basic principles of sequential organization of clauses found in other SLs. However, simultaneity, the use of space, core argument omission, and the use of CA challenge the traditional notion of a clause as a sequential string of constituents. Though a clause as the basic unit of analysis in typological studies on constituent order in SZJ and SLs in general needs to be re-examined, the current study has shown that it is possible to analyse utterances in SZJ from a “clause-level perspective” (cf. Hodge 2013). Topicalization, the use of DS, core argument omission or implicit argument presence as a result of agent defocusing strategies via, for example, CA may alter the neutral constituent order. The evidence of these factors in our data questions the previous finding about constituent order in SZJ as the most important characteristic that can resolve structural ambiguity (Polovina & Dimić 2009), and raises the question about prominence of grammatical meanings and grammatical relations in SZJ. Gaining a more detailed insight into the typological nature of SZJ clearly requires further analysis of different types of data.

The additional file for this article can be found as follows: