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Word order

January 13, 2023

In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are

Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information. Other languages—often those that convey grammatical information through inflection—allow more flexible word order, which can be used to encode pragmatic information, such as topicalisation or focus. However, even languages with flexible word order have a preferred or basic word order,[1] with other word orders considered "marked".[2]

Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O).[3][4][5][6] Subject and object are here understood to be nouns, since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties.[7][8] Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders:

Constituent word orders

These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object):

Sometimes patterns are more complex: some Germanic languages have SOV in subordinate clauses, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.

Many synthetic languages such as Latin, Greek, Persian, Romanian, Assyrian, Assamese, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, and Basque have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. However, also in languages of this kind there is usually a pragmatically neutral constituent order that is most commonly encountered in each language.

Topic-prominent languages organize sentences to emphasize their topic–comment structure. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin and Turkish, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses.[citation needed] Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. ("O" for object may be replaced with "P" for "patient" as well.) Thus, Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. In such an approach, the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For example, Mayan languages have been described with the rather uncommon VOS word order. However, they are ergative–absolutive languages, and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where the S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb. Indeed, many languages that some thought had a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.

Distribution of word order types

Every language falls under one of the six word order types; the unfixed type is somewhat disputed in the community, as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct.

The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer. The 2005 study[11] surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study[8] investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies.

Word Order Number (2005) Percentage (2005) Number (2013) Percentage (2013)
SOV 497 40.5% 565 41.0%
SVO 435 35.4% 488 35.4%
VSO 85 6.9% 95 6.9%
VOS 26 2.1% 25 1.8%
OVS 9 0.7% 11 0.8%
OSV 4 0.3% 4 0.3%
Unfixed 172 14.0% 189 13.7%

Hammarström (2016)[12] calculated the constituent orders of 5252 languages in two ways. His first method, counting languages directly, yielded results similar to Dryer's studies, indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution. However, when stratified by language families, the distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure, meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure.

Word Order No. of Languages Percentage No. of Families Percentage[a]
SOV 2275 43.3% 239 56.6%
SVO 2117 40.3% 55 13.0%
VSO 503 9.5% 27 6.3%
VOS 174 3.3% 15 3.5%
OVS 40 0.7% 3 0.7%
OSV 19 0.3% 1 0.2%
Unfixed 124 2.3% 26 6.1%

Functions of constituent word order

Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.[1]

Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.

The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V, however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.[13]

Semantics of word order

Main articles: Semantics and Topicalization

In many languages, standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis. In languages such as O'odham and Hungarian, which are discussed below, almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical, but not all of them are used.[14] In languages such as English and German, word order is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences:

A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt wen?' [Whom does Kate love? / Kate loves whom?] (OVS/SVO)

B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark ist der, den sie liebt' [She loves Mark / It is Mark whom she loves.] (SVO/OSV)

C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?' [Does Kate love Mark?] (VSO)

In (A), the first sentence shows the word order used for wh-questions in English and German. The second sentence is an echo question; it would only be uttered after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question. One could replace the word wen [whom] (which indicates that this sentence is a question) with an identifier such as Mark: 'Kate liebt Mark?' [Kate loves Mark?]. In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify the sentence as a question.

In (B), the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in (A). The second sentence emphasizes that Kate does indeed love Mark, and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love. However, a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech (or even in written language), be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer the echo question in (A) simply by restating: Mark!. This is the same for both languages.

In yes–no questions such as (C), English and German use subject-verb inversion. But, whereas English relies on do-support to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries, German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions, even from lexical verbs.

Despite this, English, as opposed to German, has very strict word order. In German, word order can be used as a means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 (verb-first) word order is used. And lastly, dependent clauses use verb-final word order. However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on the placement of the subject and object(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb[clarification needed]).

Phrase word orders and branching

Main articles: Branching (linguistics) and Head directionality parameter

The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and/or after the head noun.

  • adjective (red house vs house red)
  • determiner (this house vs house this)
  • numeral (two houses vs houses two)
  • possessor (my house vs house my)
  • relative clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)

Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately (For whom? or Whom for?) or at the same time (from her away; Dutch example: met hem mee meaning together with him).

There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For SVO languages, either order is common.

For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as extraordinaire, which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов=six houses, домов шесть=circa six houses).

Pragmatic word order

Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However, the degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order: some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking, while others (such as some varieties of Datooga) may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments.

Typologically, there is a trend that high-animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low-animacy undergoers; this trend can come through even in languages with free word order, giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS order in ergative systems; however, ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy, sometimes giving way to an accusative system (see split ergativity)).[15]

Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Latin, Albanian, and O'odham. In some languages, a general word order can be identified, but this is much harder in others.[16] When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the rheme.

Hungarian

Main article: Hungarian language

Word order in Hungarian sentences is changed according to the speaker's communicative intentions. Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence, distinguishing the emphatic part that carries new information (rheme) from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information (theme).

The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb.

For "Kate ate a piece of cake", the possibilities are:

  1. "Kati megevett egy szelet tortát." (same word order as English) ["Kate ate a piece of cake."]
  2. "Egy szelet tortát Kati evett meg." (emphasis on agent [Kate]) ["A piece of cake Kate ate."] (One of the pieces of cake was eaten by Kate.)
  3. "Kati evett meg egy szelet tortát." (also emphasis on agent [Kate]) ["Kate ate a piece of cake."] (Kate was the one eating one piece of cake.)
  4. "Kati egy szelet tortát evett meg." (emphasis on object [cake]) ["Kate a piece of cake ate."] (Kate ate a piece of cake – cf. not a piece of bread.)
  5. "Egy szelet tortát evett meg Kati." (emphasis on number [a piece, i.e. only one piece]) ["A piece of cake ate Kate."] (Only one piece of cake was eaten by Kate.)
  6. "Megevett egy szelet tortát Kati." (emphasis on completeness of action) ["Ate a piece of cake Kate."] (A piece of cake had been finished by Kate.)
  7. "Megevett Kati egy szelet tortát." (emphasis on completeness of action) ["Ate Kate a piece of cake."] (Kate finished with a piece of cake.)

The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that the order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above. These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged.

Note that the emphasis can be on the action (verb) itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action (verb), as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb (in the above example 'meg'), then the co-verb is separated from the verb, and always follows the verb. Also note that the enclitic -t marks the direct object: 'torta' (cake) + '-t' -> 'tortát'.

Hindi-Urdu

Main article: Hindustani grammar

Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions mark quite explicitly the relationships of noun phrases with other constituents of the sentence.[17] Word order in Hindustani usually does not signal grammatical functions.[18] Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in a sentence is usually the topic,[19][18] which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle "to" (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は (wa).[20][21][22][23] Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows:

  • An adjective comes before the noun it modifies in its unmarked position. However, the possessive and reflexive pronominal adjectives can occur either to the left or to the right of the noun it describes.
  • Negation must come either to the left or to the right of the verb it negates. For compound verbs or verbal construction using auxiliaries the negation can occur either to the left of the first verb, in-between the verbs or to the right of the second verb (the default position being to the left of the main verb when used with auxiliary and in-between the primary and the secondary verb when forming a compound verb).
  • Adverbs usually precede the adjectives they qualify in their unmarked position, but when adverbs are constructed using the instrumental case postposition se (से /سے) (which qualifies verbs), their position in the sentence becomes free. However, since both the instrumental and the ablative case are marked by the same postposition "se" (से /سے), when both are present in a sentence then the quantity they modify cannot appear adjacent to each other[clarification needed].[24][18]
  • "kyā " (क्या / کیا) "what" as the yes-no question marker occurs at the beginning or the end of a clause as its unmarked positions but it can be put anywhere in the sentence except the preverbal position, where instead it is interpreted as interrogative "what".

Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence "The girl received a gift from the boy on her birthday." are shown below.

  • lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe taufā milā
  • lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā milā
  • janmdin pe lar̥ki ko milā lar̥ke se taufā
  • taufā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko janmdin pe milā
  • milā janmdin pe lar̥ki ko taufā lar̥ke se
  • lar̥ki ko taufā lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā
  • lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe milā
  • janmdin pe lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko milā
  • taufā lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā lar̥ki ko
  • milā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā lar̥ke se
  • taufā lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā
  • taufā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko milā janmdin pe
  • janmdin pe milā lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko
  • lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā taufā lar̥ki ko
  • milā taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe lar̥ke se
  • lar̥ke se milā lar̥ki ko taufā janmdin pe
  • lar̥ke se milā taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe
  • taufā lar̥ke se milā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe
  • taufā milā lar̥ke se janmdin pe lar̥ki ko
  • milā lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe taufā
  • lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe milā
  • lar̥ke se janmdin pe lar̥ki ko milā taufā
  • taufā janmdin pe lar̥ke se milā lar̥ki ko
  • lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā milā lar̥ke se
  • milā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā

Portuguese

Main article: Portuguese grammar

In Portuguese, clitic pronouns and commas allow many different orders:[citation needed]

  • "Eu vou entregar a você amanhã." ["I will deliver to you tomorrow."] (same word order as English)
  • "Entregarei a você amanhã." ["{I} will deliver to you tomorrow."]
  • "Eu lhe entregarei amanhã." ["I to you will deliver tomorrow."]
  • "Entregar-lhe-ei amanhã." ["Deliver to you {I} will tomorrow."] (mesoclisis)
  • "A ti, eu entregarei amanhã." ["To you I will deliver tomorrow."]
  • "A ti, entregarei amanhã." ["To you deliver {I} will tomorrow."]
  • "Amanhã, entregar-te-ei" ["Tomorrow {I} will deliver to you"]
  • "Poderia entregar, eu, a você amanhã?" ["Could deliver I to you tomorrow?]

Braces ({ }) are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns, which may be implicit in Portuguese. Because of conjugation, the grammatical person is recovered.

Latin

Main article: Latin word order

In Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles.

The Subject, Verb, and Object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last.[25] Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question:[26]

  • "Romulus Romam condidit." ["Romulus founded Rome"] (What did Romulus do?)
  • "Hanc urbem condidit Romulus." ["Romulus founded this city"] (Who founded this city?)
  • "Condidit Romam Romulus." ["Romulus founded Rome"] (What happened?)

Latin prose often follows the word order "Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb",[27] but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify,[28] but some categories, such as those that determine or specify (e.g. Via Appia "Appian Way"), usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion.

Albanian

Main article: Albanian language

Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, the Albanian language permits a large number of positional combination of words. In spoken language a word order differing from the most common S-V-O helps the speaker putting emphasis on a word, thus changing partially the message delivered. Here is an example:

  • "Marku më dha një dhuratë (mua)." ["Mark (me) gave a present to me."] (neutral narrating sentence.)
  • "Marku (mua) më dha një dhuratë." ["Mark to me (me) gave a present."] (emphasis on the indirect object, probably to compare the result of the verb on different persons.)
  • "Marku një dhuratë më dha (mua)." ["Mark a present (me) gave to me"] (meaning that Mark gave her only a present, and not something else or more presents.)
  • "Marku një dhuratë (mua) më dha." ["Mark a present to me (me) gave"] (meaning that Mark gave a present only to her.)
  • "Më dha Marku një dhuratë (mua)." ["Gave Mark to me a present."] (neutral sentence, but puts less emphasis on the subject.)
  • "Më dha një dhuratë Marku (mua)." ["Gave a present to me Mark."] (probably is the cause of an event being introduced later.)
  • "Më dha (mua) Marku një dhurate." ["Gave to me Mark a present."] (same as above.)
  • "Më dha një dhuratë mua Marku" ["(Me) gave a present to me Mark."] (puts emphasis on the fact that the receiver is her and not someone else.)
  • "Një dhuratë më dha Marku (mua)" ["A present gave Mark to me."] (meaning it was a present and not something else.)
  • "Një dhuratë Marku më dha (mua)" ["A present Mark gave to me."] (puts emphasis on the fact that she got the present and someone else got something different.)
  • "Një dhuratë (mua) më dha Marku." ["A present to me gave Mark."] (no particular emphasis, but can be used to list different actions from different subjects.)
  • "Një dhuratë (mua) Marku më dha." ["A present to me Mark (me) gave"] (remembers that at least a present was given to her by Mark.)
  • "Mua më dha Marku një dhuratë." ["To me (me) gave Mark a present." (is used when Mark gave something else to others.)
  • "Mua një dhuratë më dha Marku." ["To me a present (me) gave Mark."] (emphasis on "to me" and the fact that it was a present, only one present or it was something different from usual.)
  • "Mua Marku një dhuratë më dha" ["To me Mark a present (me) gave."] (Mark gave her only one present.)
  • "Mua Marku më dha një dhuratë" ["To me Mark (me) gave a present."] (puts emphasis on Mark. Probably the others didn't give her present, they gave something else or the present wasn't expected at all.)

In these examples, "(mua)" can be omitted when not in first position, causing a perceivable change in emphasis; the latter being of different intensity. "Më" is always followed by the verb. Thus, a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and two objects (a direct and an indirect one), can be expressed in six different ways without "mua", and in twenty-four different ways with "mua", adding up to thirty possible combinations.

O'odham (Papago-Pima)

Main article: Oʼodham language

O'odham is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. It has free word order, with only the auxiliary bound to one spot. Here is an example, in literal translation:[14]

  • "Wakial 'o g wipsilo ha-cecposid." [Cowboy is the calves them branding.] (The cowboy is branding the calves.)
  • "Wipsilo 'o ha-cecposid g wakial." [Calves is them branding the cowboy.]
  • "Ha-cecposid 'o g wakial g wipsilo." [Them Branding is the cowboy the calves.]
  • "Wipsilo 'o g wakial ha-cecposid." [Calves is the cowboy them branding.]
  • "Ha-cecposid 'o g wipsilo g wakial." [Them branding is the calves the cowboy.]
  • "Wakial 'o ha-cecposid g wipsilo." [Cowboy is them branding the calves.]

These examples are all grammatically-valid variations on the sentence "The cowboy is branding the calves," but some are rarely found in natural speechm, as is discussed in Grammaticality.

Other issues with word order

Language change

Languages change over time. When language change involves a shift in a language's syntax, this is called syntactic change. An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution.[29] In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct:

  • "Martianus hæfde his sunu ær befæst." [Martianus had his son earlier established.] (Martianus had earlier established his son.)
  • "Se wolde gelytlian þone lyfigendan hælend." [He would diminish the living saviour.]

This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage.[30] Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example:

  • "It was our selfe thou didst abuse."[31]

A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic. There are some verbs, however, that are entirely acceptable in this format:

  • "Are they good?"[32]

This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic. This is due to the verb "to be", which acts as both auxiliary and main verb. Similarly, other auxiliary and modal verbs allow for VSO word order ("Must he perish?"). Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage ("Did he buy the book?"). Shakespeare's usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before.[33]

This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic, the language of the Christian Church in Egypt.[34]

Dialectal variation

There are some languages where certain word order is preferred by one or more dialects, while others use a different order. One such case is Andean Spanish, spoken in Peru. While Spanish is classified as an SVO language,[35] the variation of Spanish spoken in Peru has been influenced by contact with Quechua and Aymara, both SOV languages.[36] This has had the effect of introducing OV (object-verb) word order into the clauses of some L1 Spanish speakers (moreso than would usually be expected), with more L2 speakers using similar constructions.

Poetry

Poetry and stories can use different word orders to emphasize certain aspects of the sentence. In English, this is called anastrophe. Here is an example:

"Kate loves Mark."

"Mark, Kate loves."

Here SVO is changed to OSV to emphasize the object.

Translation

Differences in word order complicate translation and language education – in addition to changing the individual words, the order must also be changed. The area in Linguistics that is concerned with translation and education is language acquisition. The reordering of words can run into problems, however, when transcribing stories. Rhyme scheme can change, as well as the meaning behind the words. This can be especially problematic when translating poetry.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Hammarström included families with no data in his count (58 out of 424 = 13,7%), but did not include them in the list. This explains why the percentages do not sum to 100% in this column.

References

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  2. ^ Sakel, Jeanette (2015). Study Skills for Linguistics. Routledge. p. 61. ISBN 9781317530107.
  3. ^ Hengeveld, Kees (1992). Non-verbal predication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-013713-5.
  4. ^ Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (1993). "Das Nomen – eine universale Kategorie?" [The noun – a universal category?]. STUF - Language Typology and Universals (in German). 46 (1–4). doi:10.1524/stuf.1993.46.14.187. S2CID 192204875.
  5. ^ Rijkhoff, Jan (November 2007). "Word Classes: Word Classes". Language and Linguistics Compass. 1 (6): 709–726. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00030.x. S2CID 5404720.
  6. ^ Rijkhoff, Jan (2004), The Noun Phrase, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-926964-5.
  7. ^ Greenberg, Joseph H. (1963). "Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements" (PDF). In Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.). Universals of Human Language. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp. 73–113. doi:10.1515/9781503623217-005. ISBN 9781503623217. S2CID 2675113.
  8. ^ a b Dryer, Matthew S. (2013). "Order of Subject, Object and Verb". In Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  9. ^ Tomlin, Russel S. (1986). Basic Word Order: Functional Principles. London: Croom Helm. ISBN 0-415-72357-4.
  10. ^ Kordić, Snježana (2006) [1st pub. 1997]. Serbo-Croatian. Languages of the World/Materials ; 148. Munich & Newcastle: Lincom Europa. pp. 45–46. ISBN 3-89586-161-8. OCLC 37959860. OL 2863538W. Contents. Summary. [Grammar book].
  11. ^ Dryer, M. S. (2005). "Order of Subject, Object, and Verb". In Haspelmath, M. (ed.). The World Atlas of Language Structures.
  12. ^ Hammarström, H. (2016). "Linguistic diversity and language evolution". Journal of Language Evolution. 1 (1): 19–29. doi:10.1093/jole/lzw002.
  13. ^ Dryer, Matthew S. (1992). "The Greenbergian word order correlations". Language. 68 (1): 81–138. doi:10.1353/lan.1992.0028. JSTOR 416370. S2CID 9693254. Project MUSE 452860.
  14. ^ a b Hale, Kenneth L. (1992). "Basic word order in two "free word order" languages". Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility. Typological Studies in Language. Vol. 22. p. 63. doi:10.1075/tsl.22.03hal. ISBN 978-90-272-2905-2.
  15. ^ Comrie, Bernard (1981). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology (2nd edn). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  16. ^ Rude, Noel (1992). "Word order and topicality in Nez Perce". Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility. Typological Studies in Language. Vol. 22. p. 193. doi:10.1075/tsl.22.08rud. ISBN 978-90-272-2905-2.
  17. ^ Kachru, Yamuna (2006). Hindi. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 159–160. ISBN 90-272-3812-X.
  18. ^ a b c Mohanan, Tara (1994). "Case OCP: A Constraint on Word Order in Hindi". In Butt, Miriam; King, Tracy Holloway; Ramchand, Gillian (eds.). Theoretical Perspectives on Word Order in South Asian Languages. Center for the Study of Language (CSLI). pp. 185–216. ISBN 978-1-881526-49-0.
  19. ^ Gambhir, Surendra Kumar (1984). The East Indian speech community in Guyana: a sociolinguistic study with special reference to koine formation (Thesis). OCLC 654720956.[page needed]
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  23. ^ Vasishth, Shravan (2004). "Discourse Context and Word Order Preferences in Hindi". The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (2004). pp. 113–128. doi:10.1515/9783110179897.113. ISBN 978-3-11-020776-7.
  24. ^ Spencer, Andrew (2005). "Case in Hindi". The Proceedings of the LFG '05 Conference (PDF). pp. 429–446.
  25. ^ Scrivner, Olga (June 2015). A Probabilistic Approach in Historical Linguistics. Word Order Change in Infinitival Clauses: from Latin to Old French (Thesis). p. 32. hdl:2022/20230.
  26. ^ Spevak, Olga (2010). Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose, p. 1, quoting Weil (1844).
  27. ^ Devine, Andrew M. & Laurence D. Stephens (2006), Latin Word Order, p. 79.
  28. ^ Walker, Arthur T. (1918). "Some Facts of Latin Word-Order". The Classical Journal. 13 (9): 644–657. JSTOR 3288352.
  29. ^ Taylor, Ann; Pintzuk, Susan (1 December 2011). "The interaction of syntactic change and information status effects in the change from OV to VO in English". Catalan Journal of Linguistics. 10: 71. doi:10.5565/rev/catjl.61.
  30. ^ Trips, Carola (2002). From OV to VO in Early Middle English. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Vol. 60. doi:10.1075/la.60. ISBN 978-90-272-2781-2.
  31. ^ Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616, author. (4 February 2020). Henry V. ISBN 978-1-9821-0941-7. OCLC 1105937654. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  32. ^ Shakespeare, William (1941). Much Ado about Nothing. Boston, USA: Ginn and Company. pp. 12, 16.
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  34. ^ Loprieno, Antonio (2000). "From VSO to SVO? Word Order and Rear Extraposition in Coptic". Stability, Variation and Change of Word-Order Patterns over Time. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Vol. 213. pp. 23–39. doi:10.1075/cilt.213.05lop. ISBN 978-90-272-3720-0.
  35. ^ "Spanish". The Romance Languages. 2003. pp. 91–142. doi:10.4324/9780203426531-7. ISBN 978-0-203-42653-1.
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Further reading

  • A collection of papers on word order by a leading scholar, some downloadable
  • Basic word order in English clearly illustrated with examples.
  • Bernard Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology (1981) – this is the authoritative introduction to word order and related subjects.
  • Order of Subject, Object, and Verb (PDF). A basic overview of word order variations across languages.
  • Haugan, Jens, Old Norse Word Order and Information Structure. Norwegian University of Science and Technology. 2001. ISBN 82-471-5060-3
  • Rijkhoff, Jan (2015). "Word Order". International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (PDF). pp. 644–656. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53031-1. ISBN 978-0-08-097087-5.
  • Song, Jae Jung (2012), Word Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-87214-0 & ISBN 978-0-521-69312-7

January 13, 2023
word, order, linguistics, word, order, also, known, linear, order, order, syntactic, constituents, language, typology, studies, from, cross, linguistic, perspective, examines, different, languages, employ, different, orders, correlations, between, orders, foun. In linguistics word order also known as linear order is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language Word order typology studies it from a cross linguistic perspective and examines how different languages employ different orders Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub domains are also of interest The primary word orders that are of interest are the constituent order of a clause namely the relative order of subject object and verb the order of modifiers adjectives numerals demonstratives possessives and adjuncts in a noun phrase the order of adverbials Some languages use relatively fixed word order often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information Other languages often those that convey grammatical information through inflection allow more flexible word order which can be used to encode pragmatic information such as topicalisation or focus However even languages with flexible word order have a preferred or basic word order 1 with other word orders considered marked 2 Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb V in combination with two arguments namely the subject S and object O 3 4 5 6 Subject and object are here understood to be nouns since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties 7 8 Thus a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders about half of the world s languages deploy subject object verb order SOV about one third of the world s languages deploy subject verb object order SVO a smaller fraction of languages deploy verb subject object VSO order the remaining three arrangements are rarer verb object subject VOS is slightly more common than object verb subject OVS and object subject verb OSV is the rarest by a significant margin 9 Contents 1 Constituent word orders 2 Distribution of word order types 3 Functions of constituent word order 4 Semantics of word order 5 Phrase word orders and branching 6 Pragmatic word order 6 1 Hungarian 6 2 Hindi Urdu 6 3 Portuguese 6 4 Latin 6 5 Albanian 6 6 O odham Papago Pima 7 Other issues with word order 7 1 Language change 7 2 Dialectal variation 7 3 Poetry 7 4 Translation 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References 11 Further readingConstituent word orders EditThese are all possible word orders for the subject object and verb in the order of most common to rarest the examples use she as the subject loves as the verb and him as the object SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages languages using it include Japanese Korean Mongolian Turkish the Indo Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages Some like Persian Latin and Quechua have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages A sentence glossing as She him loves would be grammatically correct in these languages SVO languages include English Bulgarian Macedonian Serbo Croatian 10 the Chinese languages and Swahili among others She loves him VSO languages include Classical Arabic Biblical Hebrew the Insular Celtic languages and Hawaiian Loves she him VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy Loves him she OVS languages include Hixkaryana Him loves she OSV languages include Xavante and Warao Him she loves Sometimes patterns are more complex some Germanic languages have SOV in subordinate clauses but V2 word order in main clauses SVO word order being the most common Using the guidelines above the unmarked word order is then SVO Many synthetic languages such as Latin Greek Persian Romanian Assyrian Assamese Russian Turkish Korean Japanese Finnish and Basque have no strict word order rather the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance However also in languages of this kind there is usually a pragmatically neutral constituent order that is most commonly encountered in each language Topic prominent languages organize sentences to emphasize their topic comment structure Nonetheless there is often a preferred order in Latin and Turkish SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts so may they have both fixed and free word orders For example Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses but a much freer SV VS order in intransitive clauses citation needed Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately with the symbol S being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause and A for the actor agent of a transitive clause O for object may be replaced with P for patient as well Thus Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV VS In such an approach the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section For example Mayan languages have been described with the rather uncommon VOS word order However they are ergative absolutive languages and the more specific word order is intransitive VS transitive VOA where the S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb Indeed many languages that some thought had a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan Distribution of word order types EditEvery language falls under one of the six word order types the unfixed type is somewhat disputed in the community as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer The 2005 study 11 surveyed 1228 languages and the updated 2013 study 8 investigated 1377 languages Percentage was not reported in his studies Word Order Number 2005 Percentage 2005 Number 2013 Percentage 2013 SOV 497 40 5 565 41 0 SVO 435 35 4 488 35 4 VSO 85 6 9 95 6 9 VOS 26 2 1 25 1 8 OVS 9 0 7 11 0 8 OSV 4 0 3 4 0 3 Unfixed 172 14 0 189 13 7 Hammarstrom 2016 12 calculated the constituent orders of 5252 languages in two ways His first method counting languages directly yielded results similar to Dryer s studies indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution However when stratified by language families the distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure Word Order No of Languages Percentage No of Families Percentage a SOV 2275 43 3 239 56 6 SVO 2117 40 3 55 13 0 VSO 503 9 5 27 6 3 VOS 174 3 3 15 3 5 OVS 40 0 7 3 0 7 OSV 19 0 3 1 0 2 Unfixed 124 2 3 26 6 1 Functions of constituent word order EditFixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents This works because speech is inherently linear Another method is to label the constituents in some way for example with case marking agreement or another marker Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking one counter example being Persian 1 Observing discourse patterns it is found that previously given information topic tends to precede new information comment Furthermore acting participants especially humans are more likely to be talked about to be topic than things simply undergoing actions like oranges being eaten If acting participants are often topical and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence the subject The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders 13 Semantics of word order EditMain articles Semantics and Topicalization In many languages standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis In languages such as O odham and Hungarian which are discussed below almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical but not all of them are used 14 In languages such as English and German word order is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences A Wen liebt Kate Kate liebt wen Whom does Kate love Kate loves whom OVS SVO B Sie liebt Mark Mark ist der den sie liebt She loves Mark It is Mark whom she loves SVO OSV C Liebt Kate Mark Does Kate love Mark VSO In A the first sentence shows the word order used for wh questions in English and German The second sentence is an echo question it would only be uttered after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question One could replace the word wen whom which indicates that this sentence is a question with an identifier such as Mark Kate liebt Mark Kate loves Mark In that case since no change in word order occurs it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify the sentence as a question In B the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in A The second sentence emphasizes that Kate does indeed love Mark and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love However a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech or even in written language be it in English or in German Instead one would most likely answer the echo question in A simply by restating Mark This is the same for both languages In yes no questions such as C English and German use subject verb inversion But whereas English relies on do support to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions even from lexical verbs Despite this English as opposed to German has very strict word order In German word order can be used as a means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 verb second language where in independent clauses the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent In closed questions V1 verb first word order is used And lastly dependent clauses use verb final word order However German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on the placement of the subject and object s even though a preference for a certain word order over others can be observed such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb clarification needed Phrase word orders and branching EditMain articles Branching linguistics and Head directionality parameter The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause Normally the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated Within the noun phrase one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and or after the head noun adjective red house vs house red determiner this house vs house this numeral two houses vs houses two possessor my house vs house my relative clause the by me built house vs the house built by me Within the adpositional clause one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions in London postpositions London in or both normally with different adpositions at both sides either separately For whom or Whom for or at the same time from her away Dutch example met hem mee meaning together with him There are several common correlations between sentence level word order and phrase level constituent order For example SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads and use prepositions For SVO languages either order is common For example French SVO uses prepositions dans la voiture a gauche and places adjectives after une voiture spacieuse However a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads une grande voiture On the other hand in English also SVO adjectives almost always go before nouns a big car and adverbs can go either way but initially is more common greatly improved English has a very small number of adjectives that go after the heads such as extraordinaire which kept its position when borrowed from French Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation shest domov six houses domov shest circa six houses Pragmatic word order EditSome languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments However the degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking while others such as some varieties of Datooga may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments Typologically there is a trend that high animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low animacy undergoers this trend can come through even in languages with free word order giving a statistical bias for SO order or OS order in ergative systems however ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy sometimes giving way to an accusative system see split ergativity 15 Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders such as Polish Hungarian Portuguese Latin Albanian and O odham In some languages a general word order can be identified but this is much harder in others 16 When the word order is free different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the rheme Hungarian Edit Main article Hungarian language Word order in Hungarian sentences is changed according to the speaker s communicative intentions Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence distinguishing the emphatic part that carries new information rheme from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information theme The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb that is nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb For Kate ate a piece of cake the possibilities are Kati megevett egy szelet tortat same word order as English Kate ate a piece of cake Egy szelet tortat Kati evett meg emphasis on agent Kate A piece of cake Kate ate One of the pieces of cake was eaten by Kate Kati evett meg egy szelet tortat also emphasis on agent Kate Kate ate a piece of cake Kate was the one eating one piece of cake Kati egy szelet tortat evett meg emphasis on object cake Kate a piece of cake ate Kate ate a piece of cake cf not a piece of bread Egy szelet tortat evett meg Kati emphasis on number a piece i e only one piece A piece of cake ate Kate Only one piece of cake was eaten by Kate Megevett egy szelet tortat Kati emphasis on completeness of action Ate a piece of cake Kate A piece of cake had been finished by Kate Megevett Kati egy szelet tortat emphasis on completeness of action Ate Kate a piece of cake Kate finished with a piece of cake The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that the order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above These pairs of sentences have the same information structure expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged Note that the emphasis can be on the action verb itself as seen in sentences 1 6 and 7 or it can be on parts other than the action verb as seen in sentences 2 3 4 and 5 If the emphasis is not on the verb and the verb has a co verb in the above example meg then the co verb is separated from the verb and always follows the verb Also note that the enclitic t marks the direct object torta cake t gt tortat Hindi Urdu Edit Main article Hindustani grammar Hindi Urdu Hindustani is essentially a verb final SOV language with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions mark quite explicitly the relationships of noun phrases with other constituents of the sentence 17 Word order in Hindustani usually does not signal grammatical functions 18 Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations or for stylistic reasons The first syntactic constituent in a sentence is usually the topic 19 18 which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle to त تو similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は wa 20 21 22 23 Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows An adjective comes before the noun it modifies in its unmarked position However the possessive and reflexive pronominal adjectives can occur either to the left or to the right of the noun it describes Negation must come either to the left or to the right of the verb it negates For compound verbs or verbal construction using auxiliaries the negation can occur either to the left of the first verb in between the verbs or to the right of the second verb the default position being to the left of the main verb when used with auxiliary and in between the primary and the secondary verb when forming a compound verb Adverbs usually precede the adjectives they qualify in their unmarked position but when adverbs are constructed using the instrumental case postposition se स سے which qualifies verbs their position in the sentence becomes free However since both the instrumental and the ablative case are marked by the same postposition se स سے when both are present in a sentence then the quantity they modify cannot appear adjacent to each other clarification needed 24 18 kya क य کیا what as the yes no question marker occurs at the beginning or the end of a clause as its unmarked positions but it can be put anywhere in the sentence except the preverbal position where instead it is interpreted as interrogative what Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence The girl received a gift from the boy on her birthday are shown below lar ki ko lar ke se janmdin pe taufa mila lar ke se lar ki ko janmdin pe taufa mila janmdin pe lar ki ko mila lar ke se taufa taufa lar ke se lar ki ko janmdin pe mila mila janmdin pe lar ki ko taufa lar ke se lar ki ko taufa lar ke se janmdin pe mila lar ke se taufa lar ki ko janmdin pe mila janmdin pe lar ke se taufa lar ki ko mila taufa lar ke se janmdin pe mila lar ki ko mila lar ki ko janmdin pe taufa lar ke se taufa lar ki ko lar ke se janmdin pe mila taufa lar ke se lar ki ko mila janmdin pe janmdin pe mila lar ke se taufa lar ki ko lar ke se janmdin pe mila taufa lar ki ko mila taufa lar ki ko janmdin pe lar ke se lar ke se mila lar ki ko taufa janmdin pe lar ke se mila taufa lar ki ko janmdin pe taufa lar ke se mila lar ki ko janmdin pe taufa mila lar ke se janmdin pe lar ki ko mila lar ki ko lar ke se janmdin pe taufa lar ke se taufa lar ki ko janmdin pe mila lar ke se janmdin pe lar ki ko mila taufa taufa janmdin pe lar ke se mila lar ki ko lar ki ko janmdin pe taufa mila lar ke se mila lar ke se lar ki ko janmdin pe taufaPortuguese Edit Main article Portuguese grammar In Portuguese clitic pronouns and commas allow many different orders citation needed Eu vou entregar a voce amanha I will deliver to you tomorrow same word order as English Entregarei a voce amanha I will deliver to you tomorrow Eu lhe entregarei amanha I to you will deliver tomorrow Entregar lhe ei amanha Deliver to you I will tomorrow mesoclisis A ti eu entregarei amanha To you I will deliver tomorrow A ti entregarei amanha To you deliver I will tomorrow Amanha entregar te ei Tomorrow I will deliver to you Poderia entregar eu a voce amanha Could deliver I to you tomorrow Braces are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns which may be implicit in Portuguese Because of conjugation the grammatical person is recovered Latin Edit Main article Latin word order In Latin the endings of nouns verbs adjectives and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations Latin lacks articles The Subject Verb and Object can come in any order in a Latin sentence although most often especially in subordinate clauses the verb comes last 25 Pragmatic factors such as topic and focus play a large part in determining the order Thus the following sentences each answer a different question 26 Romulus Romam condidit Romulus founded Rome What did Romulus do Hanc urbem condidit Romulus Romulus founded this city Who founded this city Condidit Romam Romulus Romulus founded Rome What happened Latin prose often follows the word order Subject Direct Object Indirect Object Adverb Verb 27 but this is more of a guideline than a rule Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify 28 but some categories such as those that determine or specify e g Via Appia Appian Way usually follow the noun In Classical Latin poetry lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion Albanian Edit Main article Albanian language Due to the presence of grammatical cases nominative genitive dative accusative ablative and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative applied to nouns pronouns and adjectives the Albanian language permits a large number of positional combination of words In spoken language a word order differing from the most common S V O helps the speaker putting emphasis on a word thus changing partially the message delivered Here is an example Marku me dha nje dhurate mua Mark me gave a present to me neutral narrating sentence Marku mua me dha nje dhurate Mark to me me gave a present emphasis on the indirect object probably to compare the result of the verb on different persons Marku nje dhurate me dha mua Mark a present me gave to me meaning that Mark gave her only a present and not something else or more presents Marku nje dhurate mua me dha Mark a present to me me gave meaning that Mark gave a present only to her Me dha Marku nje dhurate mua Gave Mark to me a present neutral sentence but puts less emphasis on the subject Me dha nje dhurate Marku mua Gave a present to me Mark probably is the cause of an event being introduced later Me dha mua Marku nje dhurate Gave to me Mark a present same as above Me dha nje dhurate mua Marku Me gave a present to me Mark puts emphasis on the fact that the receiver is her and not someone else Nje dhurate me dha Marku mua A present gave Mark to me meaning it was a present and not something else Nje dhurate Marku me dha mua A present Mark gave to me puts emphasis on the fact that she got the present and someone else got something different Nje dhurate mua me dha Marku A present to me gave Mark no particular emphasis but can be used to list different actions from different subjects Nje dhurate mua Marku me dha A present to me Mark me gave remembers that at least a present was given to her by Mark Mua me dha Marku nje dhurate To me me gave Mark a present is used when Mark gave something else to others Mua nje dhurate me dha Marku To me a present me gave Mark emphasis on to me and the fact that it was a present only one present or it was something different from usual Mua Marku nje dhurate me dha To me Mark a present me gave Mark gave her only one present Mua Marku me dha nje dhurate To me Mark me gave a present puts emphasis on Mark Probably the others didn t give her present they gave something else or the present wasn t expected at all In these examples mua can be omitted when not in first position causing a perceivable change in emphasis the latter being of different intensity Me is always followed by the verb Thus a sentence consisting of a subject a verb and two objects a direct and an indirect one can be expressed in six different ways without mua and in twenty four different ways with mua adding up to thirty possible combinations O odham Papago Pima Edit Main article Oʼodham language O odham is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora Mexico It has free word order with only the auxiliary bound to one spot Here is an example in literal translation 14 Wakial o g wipsilo ha cecposid Cowboy is the calves them branding The cowboy is branding the calves Wipsilo o ha cecposid g wakial Calves is them branding the cowboy Ha cecposid o g wakial g wipsilo Them Branding is the cowboy the calves Wipsilo o g wakial ha cecposid Calves is the cowboy them branding Ha cecposid o g wipsilo g wakial Them branding is the calves the cowboy Wakial o ha cecposid g wipsilo Cowboy is them branding the calves These examples are all grammatically valid variations on the sentence The cowboy is branding the calves but some are rarely found in natural speechm as is discussed in Grammaticality Other issues with word order EditLanguage change Edit Languages change over time When language change involves a shift in a language s syntax this is called syntactic change An example of this is found in Old English which at one point had flexible word order before losing it over the course of its evolution 29 In Old English both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct Martianus haefde his sunu aer befaest Martianus had his son earlier established Martianus had earlier established his son Se wolde gelytlian thone lyfigendan haelend He would diminish the living saviour This flexibility continues into early Middle English where it seems to drop out of usage 30 Shakespeare s plays use OV word order frequently as can be seen from this example It was our selfe thou didst abuse 31 A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence but nonetheless archaic There are some verbs however that are entirely acceptable in this format Are they good 32 This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic This is due to the verb to be which acts as both auxiliary and main verb Similarly other auxiliary and modal verbs allow for VSO word order Must he perish Non auxiliary and non modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage Did he buy the book Shakespeare s usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time which had dropped OV order at least a century before 33 This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic the language of the Christian Church in Egypt 34 Dialectal variation Edit There are some languages where certain word order is preferred by one or more dialects while others use a different order One such case is Andean Spanish spoken in Peru While Spanish is classified as an SVO language 35 the variation of Spanish spoken in Peru has been influenced by contact with Quechua and Aymara both SOV languages 36 This has had the effect of introducing OV object verb word order into the clauses of some L1 Spanish speakers moreso than would usually be expected with more L2 speakers using similar constructions Poetry Edit Poetry and stories can use different word orders to emphasize certain aspects of the sentence In English this is called anastrophe Here is an example Kate loves Mark Mark Kate loves Here SVO is changed to OSV to emphasize the object Translation Edit Differences in word order complicate translation and language education in addition to changing the individual words the order must also be changed The area in Linguistics that is concerned with translation and education is language acquisition The reordering of words can run into problems however when transcribing stories Rhyme scheme can change as well as the meaning behind the words This can be especially problematic when translating poetry See also EditAntisymmetry Information flow Language changeNotes Edit Hammarstrom included families with no data in his count 58 out of 424 13 7 but did not include them in the list This explains why the percentages do not sum to 100 in this column References Edit a b Comrie Bernard 1981 Language universals and linguistic typology syntax and morphology 2nd ed University of Chicago Press Chicago Sakel Jeanette 2015 Study Skills for Linguistics Routledge p 61 ISBN 9781317530107 Hengeveld Kees 1992 Non verbal predication Berlin Mouton de Gruyter ISBN 3 11 013713 5 Sasse Hans Jurgen 1993 Das Nomen eine universale Kategorie The noun a universal category STUF Language Typology and Universals in German 46 1 4 doi 10 1524 stuf 1993 46 14 187 S2CID 192204875 Rijkhoff Jan November 2007 Word Classes Word Classes Language and Linguistics Compass 1 6 709 726 doi 10 1111 j 1749 818X 2007 00030 x S2CID 5404720 Rijkhoff Jan 2004 The Noun Phrase Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 926964 5 Greenberg Joseph H 1963 Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements PDF In Greenberg Joseph H ed Universals of Human Language Cambridge Mass MIT Press pp 73 113 doi 10 1515 9781503623217 005 ISBN 9781503623217 S2CID 2675113 a b Dryer Matthew S 2013 Order of Subject Object and Verb In Dryer Matthew S Haspelmath Martin eds The World Atlas of Language Structures Online Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Tomlin Russel S 1986 Basic Word Order Functional Principles London Croom Helm ISBN 0 415 72357 4 Kordic Snjezana 2006 1st pub 1997 Serbo Croatian Languages of the World Materials 148 Munich amp Newcastle Lincom Europa pp 45 46 ISBN 3 89586 161 8 OCLC 37959860 OL 2863538W Contents Summary Grammar book Dryer M S 2005 Order of Subject Object and Verb In Haspelmath M ed The World Atlas of Language Structures Hammarstrom H 2016 Linguistic diversity and language evolution Journal of Language Evolution 1 1 19 29 doi 10 1093 jole lzw002 Dryer Matthew S 1992 The Greenbergian word order correlations Language 68 1 81 138 doi 10 1353 lan 1992 0028 JSTOR 416370 S2CID 9693254 Project MUSE 452860 a b Hale Kenneth L 1992 Basic word order in two free word order languages Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility Typological Studies in Language Vol 22 p 63 doi 10 1075 tsl 22 03hal ISBN 978 90 272 2905 2 Comrie Bernard 1981 Language Universals and Linguistic Typology Syntax and Morphology 2nd edn Chicago University of Chicago Press Rude Noel 1992 Word order and topicality in Nez Perce Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility Typological Studies in Language Vol 22 p 193 doi 10 1075 tsl 22 08rud ISBN 978 90 272 2905 2 Kachru Yamuna 2006 Hindi Amsterdam Philadelphia John Benjamins Publishing Company pp 159 160 ISBN 90 272 3812 X a b c Mohanan Tara 1994 Case OCP A Constraint on Word Order in Hindi In Butt Miriam King Tracy Holloway Ramchand Gillian eds Theoretical Perspectives on Word Order in South Asian Languages Center for the Study of Language CSLI pp 185 216 ISBN 978 1 881526 49 0 Gambhir Surendra Kumar 1984 The East Indian speech community in Guyana a sociolinguistic study with special reference to koine formation Thesis OCLC 654720956 page needed Kuno 1981 full citation needed Kidwai 2000 full citation needed Patil Umesh Kentner Gerrit Gollrad Anja Kugler Frank Fery Caroline Vasishth Shravan 17 November 2008 Focus Word Order and Intonation in Hindi Journal of South Asian Linguistics 1 Vasishth Shravan 2004 Discourse Context and Word Order Preferences in Hindi The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2004 pp 113 128 doi 10 1515 9783110179897 113 ISBN 978 3 11 020776 7 Spencer Andrew 2005 Case in Hindi The Proceedings of the LFG 05 Conference PDF pp 429 446 Scrivner Olga June 2015 A Probabilistic Approach in Historical Linguistics Word Order Change in Infinitival Clauses from Latin to Old French Thesis p 32 hdl 2022 20230 Spevak Olga 2010 Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose p 1 quoting Weil 1844 Devine Andrew M amp Laurence D Stephens 2006 Latin Word Order p 79 Walker Arthur T 1918 Some Facts of Latin Word Order The Classical Journal 13 9 644 657 JSTOR 3288352 Taylor Ann Pintzuk Susan 1 December 2011 The interaction of syntactic change and information status effects in the change from OV to VO in English Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10 71 doi 10 5565 rev catjl 61 Trips Carola 2002 From OV to VO in Early Middle English Linguistik Aktuell Linguistics Today Vol 60 doi 10 1075 la 60 ISBN 978 90 272 2781 2 Shakespeare William 1564 1616 author 4 February 2020 Henry V ISBN 978 1 9821 0941 7 OCLC 1105937654 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a last has generic name help CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Shakespeare William 1941 Much Ado about Nothing Boston USA Ginn and Company pp 12 16 Crystal David 2012 Think on my Words Exploring Shakespeare s Language Cambridge University Press p 205 ISBN 978 1 139 19699 4 Loprieno Antonio 2000 From VSO to SVO Word Order and Rear Extraposition in Coptic Stability Variation and Change of Word Order Patterns over Time Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Vol 213 pp 23 39 doi 10 1075 cilt 213 05lop ISBN 978 90 272 3720 0 Spanish The Romance Languages 2003 pp 91 142 doi 10 4324 9780203426531 7 ISBN 978 0 203 42653 1 Klee Carol A Tight Daniel G Caravedo Rocio 1 December 2011 Variation and change in Peruvian Spanish word order language contact and dialect contact in Lima Southwest Journal of Linguistics 30 2 5 32 Gale A348978474 Further reading EditA collection of papers on word order by a leading scholar some downloadable Basic word order in English clearly illustrated with examples Bernard Comrie Language Universals and Linguistic Typology Syntax and Morphology 1981 this is the authoritative introduction to word order and related subjects Order of Subject Object and Verb PDF A basic overview of word order variations across languages Haugan Jens Old Norse Word Order and Information Structure Norwegian University of Science and Technology 2001 ISBN 82 471 5060 3 Rijkhoff Jan 2015 Word Order International Encyclopedia of the Social amp Behavioral Sciences PDF pp 644 656 doi 10 1016 B978 0 08 097086 8 53031 1 ISBN 978 0 08 097087 5 Song Jae Jung 2012 Word Order Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 87214 0 amp ISBN 978 0 521 69312 7 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Word order amp oldid 1126857196, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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