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A second possible factor, related to the first, for the preference of SVO in sentence production is concerned with “disambiguation” and/or “avoidance of similarity-based competitions.” Since Kaqchikel is a head-marking language, nouns are not marked as
subjects versus objects. Therefore, in sentences where both subjects and objects are animate nouns, such as the one in (4), it is ambiguous which of the nouns is the subject and which is the object (although the VOS interpretation is favored).