| Wikipedia: Subject Verb Object |
In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. It is the second most common order found in the world, after SOV, and together, they account for more than 75% of the world's languages.[1] It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology[2].
Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Finnish, Guaraní, Hausa, Indonesian, Javanese, Kashmiri, Khmer, Latvian, Luganda, Malay, Modern Hebrew, Polish, Quiche, Rotuman, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese and Yoruba are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. The Romance languages also follow SVO construction, except for certain constructions in many of them in which a pronoun functions as the object (e.g. French: je t'aime or Spanish: (yo) te amo, lit. I you love). All of the Scandinavian languages follow this order also but change to VSO when asking a question. Some of these languages, such as English, can also use an OSV structure in certain literary styles, such as poetry.
An example of SVO order in English is:
- Andy ate oranges.
In this, Andy is the subject, ate is the verb, oranges is the object.
Some languages are more complicated: Russian allows all possible combinations SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV, VSO, VOS. Changing the word order influences the nuance of the meaning. Usually the last word in a sentence is emphasized. But other implications are possible. Varying word order is very common in Russian. In Polish, a word/phrase can be brought to the front or, less commonly, put to the back of a sentence or clause to add emphasis e.g. "Rowera ci nie kupię" (I won't buy you a bicycle), "Od piątej czekam" (I've been waiting since five).[3]
In German and in Dutch, SVO in main clauses coexists with SOV in subordinate clauses, as given in Example 1 below; and a change in syntax - for instance, by bringing an adpositional phrase to the front of the sentence for emphasis - may also dictate the use of VSO, as in Example 2. (See V2 word order.)
Example 1: "Er weiß, dass ich jeden Sonntag das Auto wasche" (German: "He knows I wash the car every Sunday", lit. "He knows, that I every Sunday the car wash"). Cf the simple sentence "Ich wasche das Auto jeden Sonntag", "I wash the car every Sunday".
Example 2: "Elke zondag was ik de auto" (Dutch: "Every Sunday I wash the car", lit. "Every Sunday wash I the car"). "Ik was de auto elke zondag" translates perfectly into English "I wash the car every Sunday", but as a result of changing the syntax, inversion SV->VS takes place.
English developed from such a reordering language, and still bears traces of this word order, for example in locative inversion ("In the garden sat a cat") and some clauses beginning with negative expressions: "only" ("only then do we find X"), "not only" ("not only did he storm away, but he also slammed the door"), "under no circumstances" ("under no circumstances are the students allowed to use a mobile phone"), "on no account" and the like.
Properties
Subject Verb Object languages almost always place relative clauses after the nouns they modify and adverbial subordinators before the clause modified.
Although some Subject Verb Object languages in West Africa, the best-known being Ewe, use postpositions in noun phrases, the vast majority of Subject Verb Object languages have prepositions like English does. Most Subject Verb Object languages place genitives after the noun, though there is a significant minority, including the postpositional SVO languages of West Africa, the Hmong-Mien languages, some Sino-Tibetan languages and such European languages as Swedish, Danish, Lithuanian and Latvian, that have prenominal genitives[4] (as would be expected in a SOV language).
Outside of European languages, Subject Verb Object languages have a strong tendency to place adjectives, demonstratives and numerals after the noun they modify, though Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malay place numerals before nouns as English does. Some linguists have come to actually view the numeral as the head in this relationship to fit the rigid right-branching of these languages[5].
See also
Sources
- ^ Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (2nd edition ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55967-7.
- ^ Diamond, Jared. The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. p. 143
- ^ Polish, An Essential Grammar by Dana Bielec (Routledge, 2007), p. 272
- ^ Order of Genitive and Noun
- ^ Donohue, Mark; "Word order in Austronesian from north to south and west to east" in Linguistic Typology 11 (2007); p. 379
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