Abstract
Research on sentence production often assumes that there is a universal mechanism
for the sentence production. Nevertheless, languages investigated so far are typolog-
ically quite limited. The aim of this paper is to investigate how VOS sentences are
produced in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala, examining animacy
effects on the choice of word order. We conducted two picture description tasks manip-
ulating animacy of the patient entity in the event while the agent was always human
being. Throughout those experiments, less VOS sentences were produced with an an-
imate patient than with an inanimate patient, suggesting that the similarity between
agent and patient, rather than the accessibility of the patient per se, affects the choice
of word order in Kaqchikel. Based on these results, we argue that VOS sentences are
produced in a way that an agent is processed first and retained in the memory until
the end of the sentence.
