| Linguistic typology |
|---|
| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
Verb–object word order (VO) is aword order where theverb typically comes before theobject.[1] About 53% of documented languages have this order.[2]
For example,Japanese would be considered an OV language, andEnglish would be considered to be VO. A basic sentence demonstrating this would be as follows.
Winfred P. Lehmann is the first to propose the reduction of the six possible permutations of word order to just two main ones, VO and OV, in what he calls theFundamental Principle of Placement (FPP), arguing that the subject is not a primary element of a sentence. VO languages are primarily right-branching, or head-initial:heads are generally found at the beginning of theirphrases.[3]
VO languages have a tendency to favor the use ofprepositions instead of postpositions, with only 42 using postpositions of the documented 498 VO languages.[4]
Some languages, such asFinnish,Hungarian,Russian,Turkish andYiddish, use both VO and OV constructions,[5] but in other instances, such asEarly Middle English, some dialects may use VO and others OV. Languages that contain both OV and VO constructions may solidify into one or the other construction in the course of their historical development. A language that moves the verb orverb phrase more than the object will have surface VO word order, and a language that moves the object more than the verb or verb phrase will have surface OV word order.