Yes, a basic motif is "Who does what to whom?".

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21028-language-50000-bc-our-ancestors-like-yoda-spoke.html

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51707337_The_origin_and_evolution_of_word_order?ev=pub_cit

http://wals.info/feature/81A?s=20&z6=3000&z5=2999&z4=2998&z3=2997&z7=2996&z2=2995&z1=2994&tg_format=map&v1=c00d&v2=cd00&v3=cff0&v4=dff0&v5=dd00&v6=d00d&v7=cccc

http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/DryerWalsSOVNoMap.pdf

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brains-natural-order

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/applying-information-theory-to-linguistics-1010.html

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/542102/

Regards,

Joachim

Article The origin and evolution of word order

Dear Joachim,

>> Yes, a basic motif is "Who does what to whom?".

It seems that the above pattern is a little bit over simplified. No computational linguistic system or cognitive computers may implement it.

At lease there are two categories of models known as the “to-be” and “to-do” patterns. In the generic language model, all parts of speeches have to be considered usually in recursive structures. It’ll get very complicated when there are several levels of recursive structures involved.

A paradigm of such generic models is presented in Wang and Berwick [JAMA 1(2), 250-263, 2012] as illustrated in the attachment. Details can be found at http://www.ucalgary.ca/icic/journalspapers .

Best,

Yingxu

Same examples as show in the attached figure indicate that the generic deductive syntax of English fit natural sentences from very simple to very complex ones. This method enables a non-statistical dependency based approach for natural language processing. Based on it, syntaxes of documents in natural languages can be rigorously analyzed, and semantics of documents in natural languages can be aggressively synthesized without the need for a complex and exhaustive statistical database for tracking the dynamics of a natural language .

Rigorous models have been reported in: Wang, Y. and R.C. Berwick (2012), Towards a Formal Framework of Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of Advanced Mathematics and Applications, 1(2), 250-263.