Information AboutWord Order |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WORD ORDER | |
| syntactic relationships | |
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In (or ''topicalization'') and is very common. In English, OSV is a ''marked word order'' because it emphasises the object. An example of OSV being used for emphasis: :A: ''I can't see Alice.'' (SVO) :B: ''What about Bill?'' :A: ''Bill I can see.'' (OSV, rather than ''I can see Bill'', SVO) OSV word order is also found in Poetry in English. SENTENCE WORD ORDERS These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest:
Others, such as Latin and Finnish , have no fixed word order; rather, the sentence structure is flexible. (Nonetheless, there is often a preferred word order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent. For more information on word order in Finnish, ''see'' Finnish Grammar .) In languages with this kind of flexible word order, the order of words in given sentence does not reliably indicate a noun's grammatical role, so nouns typically change their form to indicate their role; this is known as Case Declension . It is not understood why word orders with the subject before the object are much more common than word orders with the object before the subject. It must be noted that in most Nominative-accusative Language s there is the tendency to identify the subject with the Topic (who or what is being talked about), 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 SVO (''Je vois Cécile'' "I see Cécile"), but it incorporates or Clitic izes objective pronouns before the verb (''Je la vois'' literally "I her see"). This makes French SOV 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 SVO 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, SOV languages generally put Modifier s ( Adjective s and Adverb s) before what they modify (nouns and verbs), and use Postposition s. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use Preposition s. 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 always go before nouns ''(a big car),'' and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common ''(greatly improved).'' FREE WORD ORDER Free word order is used to indicate Discourse structure rather than to indicate who the doer is. Free word order languages include Russian , Czech , Latin , and Hungarian . FURTHER READING
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