Information AboutWord Order |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WORD ORDER | |
| syntactic relationships | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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Word order, in (or ''topicalization'') and is very common. OAV in English is a ''marked word order'' because it emphasises the object. An example of OAV being used for emphasis: :A: ''I can't see Alice.'' :B: ''What about Bill?'' :A: ''Bill I can see.'' (rather than ''I can see Bill'') Sentence word orders These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest:
It is not understood why word orders with the agent before the object are much more common than word orders with the object before the agent. It must be noted that in most Nominative-accusative Language s there is the tendency to identify the agent with the Topic (who or what is being talked about), creating a Subject , and to place the topic at the beginning of the sentence so as to establish the context quickly. Some languages can be said to have more than one basic word order. French is AVO, but it incorporates or Clitic izes objective pronouns before the verb. This makes French AOV in some sentences. However, speaking of a language having a given word order is generally understood as a reference to the basic, unmarked, non-emphatic word order for sentences with constituents expressed by full nouns or noun phrases. In other languages the word order of Transitive and Intransitive clauses may not correspond. Russian , for example, has AVO transitive clauses but free order (SV or VS) in intransitive clauses. Phrase word orders and branching See Also: Branching (linguistics) There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, AOV languages generally put Modifier s ( Adjective s and Adverb s) before what they modify (nouns and verbs), and use Postposition s. VAO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use Preposition s. For AVO languages, either order is common. For example, French (AVO) uses prepositions ''(dans la voiture, à gauche),'' and places adjectives after ''(une voiture grande).'' However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads. On the other hand, in English (also AVO) adjectives always go before nouns ''(a big car),'' and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common ''(greatly improved).'' FURTHER READING
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