| Linguistic typology |
|---|
| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
Inlinguistic typology,subject–verb–object (SVO) is asentence structure where thesubject comes first, theverb second, and theobject third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate apples."
SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, afterSOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 87% of the world's languages.[1] The label SVO often includesergative languages although they do not have nominative subjects.
Subject–verb–object languages almost always placerelative clauses after the nouns which they modify andadverbial subordinators before the clause modified, withvarieties of Chinese being notable exceptions.
Although some subject–verb–object languages inWest Africa, the best known beingEwe, usepostpositions in noun phrases, the vast majority of them, such as English, haveprepositions. Most subject–verb–object languages place genitives after the noun, but a significant minority, including the postpositional SVO languages of West Africa, theHmong–Mien languages, someSino-Tibetan languages, and European languages like Swedish, Danish, Lithuanian, and Latvian haveprenominal genitives[4] (as would be expected in anSOV language).
Non-European SVO languages usually have a strong tendency to placeadjectives,demonstratives, andnumerals after the nouns that they modify, but Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Indonesian place numerals before nouns, as in English. Some linguists have come to view the numeral as the head in the relationship to fit the rigid right-branching of these languages.[5]
There is a strong tendency, as in English, for main verbs to be preceded by auxiliaries:Iam thinking. Heshould reconsider.
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An example of SVO order in English is:
In ananalytic language such as English, subject–verb–object order is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. ("The dog bit Andy" and "Andy bit the dog" mean two completely different things, while, in case of "Bit Andy the dog", it may be difficult to determine whether it is a complete sentence or a fragment, with "Andy the dog" the object and an omitted/implied subject.)
The situation is more complex in languages that have no strict order of V and O imposed by their grammar. e.g.Russian,Finnish,Ukrainian, orHungarian. Here, the ordering is rather governed by emphasis.
Russian allows the use of subject, verb, and object in any order and "shuffles" parts to bring up a slightly different contextual meaning each time. E.g. "любит она его" (loves she him) may be used to point out "she acts this way because she LOVES him", or "его она любит" (him she loves) is used in the context "if you pay attention, you'll see that HE is the one she truly loves", or "его любит она" (him loves she) may appear along the lines "I agree that cat is a disaster, but since my wife adores it and I adore her...". Regardless of order, it is clear that "его" is the object because it is in theaccusative case.
InPolish, SVO order is basic in an affirmative sentence, and a different order is used to either emphasize some part of it or to adapt it to a broader context logic. For example,"Roweru ci nie kupię" (I won't buy youa bicycle),"Od piątej czekam" (I've been waitingsince five).[6]
InTurkish, it is normal to useSOV, but SVO may be used sometimes to emphasize the verb. For example, "John terk etti Mary'yi" (Lit.John/left/Mary: John left Mary) is the answer to the question "What did John do with Mary?" instead of the regular [SOV] sentence "John Mary'yi terk etti" (Lit.John/Mary/left).
German,Dutch, andKashmiri display the order subject-verb-object in some, especially main clauses, but really areverb-second languages, not SVO languages in the sense of a word order type.[7] They have SOV in subordinate clauses, as given in Example 1 below. Example 2 shows the effect of verb second order: the first element in the clause that comes before the V need not be the subject. In Kashmiri, the word order in embedded clauses is conditioned by the category of the subordinating conjunction, as in Example 3.
mye
to.me
ees
was
phyikyir
worry
yithi.ni
lest
tsi
you
temyis
to.him
ciThy
letter
dyikh
will.give
mye ees phyikyir yithi.ni tsi temyis ciThydyikh
to.me was worry lest you to.him letterwill.give
"I was afraid you might give him the letter"
English developed from such a reordering language and still bears traces of this word order, for example in locative inversion ("In the gardensat a cat.") and someclauses beginning with negative expressions: "only" ("Only thendo we find X."), "not only" ("Not onlydid he storm away but also slammed the door."), "under no circumstances" ("under no circumstancesare the students allowed to use a mobile phone"), "never" ("Neverhave I done that."), "on no account" and the like. In such cases,do-support is sometimes required, depending on the construction.
SVO order is permitted inHo, although the predominant clausal constituent order of the language isSOV. For example:
tʃimiŋ
how.many
hoːko
people
ho
Ho
kaji
language?
tʃimiŋ hoːko jagar-tan-a ho kaji
how.many people speak-MID.PROG-IND Ho language?
'How many people speak Ho language?'