So-called Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language also builds sentences around a subject-object-verb construction. “Consistent word order appears early in a new sign language,” she says.

In the original sentence, the subject was the pronoun “there.” Technically, this is called the “existential there,” which is just a structure we use to say something exists.

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure?