Verb-initial word order to derive the structures of verb-initial languages from underlyingly SVO structures, functional linguists would look at how cognitive principles make it possible for languages to have different word orders and why certain word orders are more common, less common, or almost non-existent. Russell Tomlin (in his 1986 paper "Basic word order. Functional principles") argued that there are three cognitively grounded principles which can account for the observed distributions of the frequencies of word order in human languages. The three principles are: Since subjects are generally more likely than objects to be topics and to have animate referents, the topic-first principle
Sentence word words "Wortsätze". One of the predominant questions concerning children and language acquisition deals with the relation between the perception and the production of a child's word usage. It is difficult to understand what a child understands about the words that they are using and what the desired outcome or goal of the utterance should be. Holophrases are defined as a "single-word utterance which is used by a child to express more than one meaning usually attributed to that single word by adults." The holophrastic hypothesis argues that children use single words to refer to different meanings in the same way