linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different
syntactic
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...
sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are
* the ''constituent order'' of a
clause
In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ...
, and
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
;
* the order of modifiers (
adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Tra ...
demonstrative
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
s,
possessive
A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...
noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
;
* the order of
adverbial
In English grammar, an adverbial (abbreviated ) is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an adverbial clause or adverbial phrase) that modifies or more closely defines the sentence or the verb. (The word ''adverbial'' itself is also used as a ...
s.
Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information. Other languages—often those that convey grammatical information through
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
—allow more flexible word order, which can be used to encode
pragmatic
Pragmatism is a philosophical movement.
Pragmatism or pragmatic may also refer to:
*Pragmaticism, Charles Sanders Peirce's post-1905 branch of philosophy
*Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics and semiotics
*''Pragmatics'', an academic journal in ...
information, such as
topicalisation
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally a ...
or focus. However, even languages with flexible word order have a preferred or basic word order,Comrie, Bernard. (1981). Language universals and linguistic typology: syntax and morphology (2nd ed). University of Chicago Press, Chicago with other word orders considered "
marked
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
".
Constituent word order is defined in terms of a
finite verb
Traditionally, a finite verb (from la, fīnītus, past participle of to put an end to, bound, limit) is the form "to which number and person appertain", in other words, those inflected for number and person. Verbs were originally said to be ''fin ...
(V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O). Subject and object are here understood to be ''
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
s'', since
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s often tend to display different word order properties. Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders:
* about half of the world's languages deploy
subject–object–verb
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...
order (SOV);
* about one-third of the world's languages deploy subject–verb–object order (SVO);
* a smaller fraction of languages deploy
verb–subject–object
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object):
* SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
,
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
Turkish
Turkish may refer to:
*a Turkic language spoken by the Turks
* of or about Turkey
** Turkish language
*** Turkish alphabet
** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation
*** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey
*** Turkish communities and mi ...
, the
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
and the
Dravidian languages
The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
. Some, like
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
and
Quechua
Quechua may refer to:
*Quechua people, several indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru
*Quechuan languages, a Native South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language
**So ...
, have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages. A sentence glossing as "She him loves" would be grammatically correct in these languages.
* SVO languages include
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
,
Bulgarian
Bulgarian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria
* Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group
* Bulgarian language, a Slavic language
* Bulgarian alphabet
* A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria
* Bul ...
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
, the
Chinese languages
The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...
and Swahili, among others. "She loves him."
* VSO languages include
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic ( ar, links=no, ٱلْعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ, al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥā) or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notab ...
,
Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of ...
, the
Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages of Brittany, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Brittany, ...
, and Hawaiian. "Loves she him."
* VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy. "Loves him she."
* OVS languages include
Hixkaryana
Hixkaryana is one of the Cariban languages, spoken by just over 500 people on the Nhamundá River, a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil. It is one of around a dozen languages that are described as having object–verb–subject word order ...
Xavante
The Xavante (also Shavante, Chavante, Akuen, A'uwe, Akwe, Awen, or Akwen) are an indigenous people, comprising 15,315 individuals within the territory of eastern Mato Grosso state in Brazil. They speak the Xavante language, part of the Jê langu ...
and Warao. "Him she loves."
Sometimes patterns are more complex: some
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
have SOV in subordinate clauses, but
V2 word order
In syntax, verb-second (V2) word order is a sentence structure in which the finite verb of a sentence or a clause is placed in the clause's second position, so that the verb is preceded by a single word or group of words (a single constituent). ...
in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.
Many
synthetic language
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express Syntax, syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the ...
s such as
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
,
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
,
Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
**Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
**Romanian cuisine, traditional ...
,
Assyrian
Assyrian may refer to:
* Assyrian people, the indigenous ethnic group of Mesopotamia.
* Assyria, a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire.
** Early Assyrian Period
** Old Assyrian Period
** Middle Assyrian Empire
** Neo-Assyrian Empire
* Assyrian ...
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
,
Turkish
Turkish may refer to:
*a Turkic language spoken by the Turks
* of or about Turkey
** Turkish language
*** Turkish alphabet
** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation
*** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey
*** Turkish communities and mi ...
,
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
,
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
,
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
, and
Basque
Basque may refer to:
* Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France
* Basque language, their language
Places
* Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France
* Basque Country (autonomous co ...
have no strict word order; rather, the
sentence structure
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
is highly flexible and reflects the
pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
of the utterance. However, also in languages of this kind there is usually a pragmatically neutral constituent order that is most commonly encountered in each language.
Topic-prominent language
A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax to emphasize the topic–comment structure of the sentence. The term is best known in American linguistics from Charles N. Li and Sandra Thompson (linguist), Sandra Thompson, who ...
s organize sentences to emphasize their
topic–comment
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or Focus (linguistics), focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structu ...
structure. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin and Turkish, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses. Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. ("O" for object may be replaced with "P" for "patient" as well.) Thus, Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. In such an approach, the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For example,
Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
have been described with the rather uncommon VOS word order. However, they are ergative–absolutive languages, and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where the S and O
arguments
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...
both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb. Indeed, many languages that some thought had a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.
Distribution of word order types
Every language falls under one of the six word order types; the unfixed type is somewhat disputed in the community, as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct.
The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer. The 2005 study surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies.
Hammarström (2016) calculated the constituent orders of 5252 languages in two ways. His first method, counting languages directly, yielded results similar to Dryer's studies, indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution. However, when stratified by
language families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...
, the distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure, meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure.
Functions of constituent word order
Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of
argument
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...
s and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with
case marking
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomina ...
,
agreement Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting o ...
, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
.
Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (
topic
Topic, topics, TOPIC, topical, or topicality may refer to:
Topic / Topics
* Topić, a Slavic surname
* ''Topics'' (Aristotle), a work by Aristotle
* Topic (chocolate bar), a brand of confectionery bar
* Topic (DJ), German musician
* Topic (g ...
) tends to precede new information (
comment
Comment may refer to:
* Comment (linguistics) or rheme, that which is said about the topic (theme) of a sentence
* Bernard Comment (born 1960), Swiss writer and publisher
Computing
* Comment (computer programming), explanatory text or informat ...
). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.
The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V, however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.
Semantics of word order
In many languages, standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis. In languages such as O'odham and Hungarian, which are discussed below, almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical, but not all of them are used. In languages such as English and German, word order is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences:
A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt ''wen''?' hom does Kate love? / Kate loves ''whom''?(OVS/SVO)
B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark ist der, den sie liebt' he loves Mark / It is ''Mark'' whom she loves.(SVO/OSV)
C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?' oes Kate love Mark?(VSO)
In (A), the first sentence shows the word order used for wh-questions in English and German. The second sentence is an echo question; it would only be uttered after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question. One could replace the word ''wen'' hom(which indicates that this sentence is a question) with an identifier such as ''Mark'': 'Kate liebt ''Mark''?' ate loves ''Mark''? In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
and tone that we are able to identify the sentence as a question.
In (B), the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in (A). The second sentence emphasizes that Kate does indeed love ''Mark'', and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love. However, a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech (or even in written language), be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer the echo question in (A) simply by restating: ''Mark!''. This is the same for both languages.
In yes–no questions such as (C), English and German use subject-verb inversion. But, whereas English relies on
do-support
''Do''-support (or ''do''-insertion), in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb ''do'', including its inflected forms ''does'' and ''did'', to form negated clauses and questions as well as other constructions in which subject–auxili ...
to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries, German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions, even from lexical verbs.
Despite this, English, as opposed to German, has very strict word order. In German, word order can be used as a means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 (verb-first) word order is used. And lastly, dependent clauses use verb-final word order. However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on the placement of the subject and object(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb).
Phrase word orders and branching
The order of constituents in a
phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...
can vary as much as the order of constituents in a
clause
In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...
. Normally, the
noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
and the
adpositional phrase
An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional phrases''. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or circ ...
are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following
modifier
Modifier may refer to:
* Grammatical modifier, a word that modifies the meaning of another word or limits its meaning
** Compound modifier, two or more words that modify a noun
** Dangling modifier, a word or phrase that modifies a clause in an am ...
s occur before and/or after the
head noun
In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase ''boiling hot water'' is the noun ''water''. Analogously, the head of a compound is the s ...
.
* adjective (''red house'' vs ''house red'')
* determiner (''this house'' vs ''house this'')
* numeral (''two houses'' vs ''houses two'')
* possessor (''my house'' vs ''house my'')
* relative clause (''the by me built house'' vs ''the house built by me'')
Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (''in London''), postpositions (''London in''), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately (''For whom?'' or ''Whom for?'') or at the same time (''from her away''; Dutch example: ''met hem mee'' meaning ''together with him'').
There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put
modifier
Modifier may refer to:
* Grammatical modifier, a word that modifies the meaning of another word or limits its meaning
** Compound modifier, two or more words that modify a noun
** Dangling modifier, a word or phrase that modifies a clause in an am ...
s before heads and use
postposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
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 almost always go before nouns ''(a big car),'' and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common ''(greatly improved).'' (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as '' extraordinaire'', which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов=''six houses'', домов шесть=''circa six houses'').
Pragmatic word order
Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However, the degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order: some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking, while others (such as some varieties of Datooga) may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments.
Typologically, there is a trend that high-animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low-animacy undergoers; this trend can come through even in languages with free word order, giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS order in ergative systems; however, ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy, sometimes giving way to an accusative system (see
split ergativity
In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergati ...
)).
Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
,
Albanian
Albanian may refer to:
*Pertaining to Albania in Southeast Europe; in particular:
**Albanians, an ethnic group native to the Balkans
**Albanian language
**Albanian culture
**Demographics of Albania, includes other ethnic groups within the country ...
, and
O'odham
The O'odham peoples, including the Tohono O'odham, the Pima or Akimel O'odham, and the Hia C-ed O'odham, are indigenous Uto-Aztecan peoples of the Sonoran desert in southern and central Arizona and northern Sonora, united by a common herita ...
. In some languages, a general word order can be identified, but this is much harder in others. When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the
theme
Theme or themes may refer to:
* Theme (arts), the unifying subject or idea of the type of visual work
* Theme (Byzantine district), an administrative district in the Byzantine Empire governed by a Strategos
* Theme (computing), a custom graphical ...
Word order in Hungarian sentences is changed according to the speaker's communicative intentions. Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence, distinguishing the emphatic part that carries new information (rheme) from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information (theme).
The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb.
For "Kate ate ''a piece of cake''", the possibilities are:
# "Kati megevett ''egy szelet tortát''." (same word order as English) Kate ate ''a piece of cake.''"# "''Egy szelet tortát'' Kati evett meg." (emphasis on agent
ate
Ate or ATE may refer to:
Organizations
* Active Training and Education Trust, a not-for-profit organization providing "Superweeks", holidays for children in the United Kingdom
* Association of Technical Employees, a trade union, now called the Nat ...
''A piece of cake'' Kate ate."(''One of the pieces of cake was eaten by Kate.'')
# "Kati evett meg ''egy szelet tortát''." (also emphasis on agent
ate
Ate or ATE may refer to:
Organizations
* Active Training and Education Trust, a not-for-profit organization providing "Superweeks", holidays for children in the United Kingdom
* Association of Technical Employees, a trade union, now called the Nat ...
Kate ate ''a piece of cake.''"(''Kate was the one eating one piece of cake.'')
# "Kati ''egy szelet tortát'' evett meg." (emphasis on object
ake
Ake (or Aké in Spanish orthography) is an archaeological site of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. It's located in the municipality of Tixkokob, in the Mexican state of Yucatán; 40 km (25 mi) east of Mérida, Yucatán.
The name ...
Kate ''a piece of cake'' ate."(''Kate ate a piece of cake '' – cf. not a piece of bread.)
# "''Egy szelet tortát'' evett meg Kati." (emphasis on number piece, i.e. only one piece''A piece of cake'' ate Kate."(''Only one piece of cake was eaten by Kate.'')
# "Megevett ''egy szelet tortát'' Kati." (emphasis on completeness of action) Ate ''a piece of cake'' Kate."(''A piece of cake had been finished by Kate.'')
# "Megevett Kati ''egy szelet tortát''." (emphasis on completeness of action) Ate Kate ''a piece of cake.''"(''Kate finished with a piece of cake.'')
The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that the order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above. These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged.
Note that the emphasis can be on the action (verb) itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action (verb), as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb (in the above example 'meg'), then the co-verb is separated from the verb, and always follows the verb. Also note that the enclitic ''-t'' marks the direct object: 'torta' (cake) + '-t' -> 'tortát'.
Hindi-Urdu
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
Hindustani) is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions mark quite explicitly the relationships of noun phrases with other constituents of the sentence. Word order in Hindustani usually does not signal grammatical functions. Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in a sentence is usually the topic, which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle "''to''" (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は ''(wa).'' Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows:
* An adjective comes before the noun it modifies in its unmarked position. However, the
possessive
A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...
and reflexive
pronominal
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...
adjectives can occur either to the left or to the right of the noun it describes.
*
Negation
In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...
must come either to the left or to the right of the verb it negates. For compound verbs or verbal construction using auxiliaries the negation can occur either to the left of the first verb, in-between the verbs or to the right of the second verb (the default position being to the left of the main verb when used with auxiliary and in-between the primary and the secondary verb when forming a compound verb).
*
Adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s usually precede the adjectives they qualify in their unmarked position, but when adverbs are constructed using the instrumental case postposition ''se'' (से /سے) (which qualifies verbs), their position in the sentence becomes free. However, since both the
instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instru ...
and the
ablative
In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. T ...
case are marked by the same postposition "''se''" (से /سے), when both are present in a sentence then the quantity they modify cannot appear adjacent to each other.
* "''kyā'' " (क्या / کیا) "what" as the yes-no question marker occurs at the beginning or the end of a clause as its unmarked positions but it can be put anywhere in the sentence except the preverbal position, where instead it is interpreted as interrogative "what".
Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence "The girl received a gift from the boy ''on her birthday''." are shown below.
Portuguese
In Portuguese,
clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
pronouns and
comma
The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...
mesoclisis
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
conjugation
Conjugation or conjugate may refer to:
Linguistics
* Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form
* Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language
Mathematics
* Complex conjugation, the chang ...
, the
grammatical person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others (third pers ...
is recovered.
Latin
In Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles.
The Subject, Verb, and Object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last. Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question:
*"Romulus Romam condidit." Romulus founded Rome"(What did Romulus do?)
*"Hanc urbem condidit Romulus." Romulus founded this city"(Who founded this city?)
*"Condidit Romam Romulus." Romulus founded Rome"(What happened?)
Latin prose often follows the word order "Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb", but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify, but some categories, such as those that determine or specify (e.g. ''Via Appia'' "Appian Way"), usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired
scansion
Scansion ( , rhymes with ''mansion''; verb: ''to scan''), or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. In classical poetry, these patterns are ...
.
Albanian
Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, the Albanian language permits a large number of positional combination of words. In spoken language a word order differing from the most common S-V-O helps the speaker putting emphasis on a word, thus changing partially the message delivered. Here is an example:
* "Marku më dha një dhuratë (mua)." Mark (me) gave a present to me."(neutral narrating sentence.)
* "Marku (mua) më dha një dhuratë." Mark to me (me) gave a present."(emphasis on the indirect object, probably to compare the result of the verb on different persons.)
* "Marku një dhuratë më dha (mua)." Mark a present (me) gave to me"(meaning that Mark gave her only a present, and not something else or more presents.)
* "Marku një dhuratë (mua) më dha." Mark a present to me (me) gave"(meaning that Mark gave a present only to her.)
* "Më dha Marku një dhuratë (mua)." Gave Mark to me a present."(neutral sentence, but puts less emphasis on the subject.)
* "Më dha një dhuratë Marku (mua)." Gave a present to me Mark."(probably is the cause of an event being introduced later.)
* "Më dha (mua) Marku një dhurate." Gave to me Mark a present."(same as above.)
* "Më dha një dhuratë mua Marku" (Me) gave a present to me Mark."(puts emphasis on the fact that the receiver is her and not someone else.)
* "Një dhuratë më dha Marku (mua)" A present gave Mark to me."(meaning it was a present and not something else.)
* "Një dhuratë Marku më dha (mua)" A present Mark gave to me."(puts emphasis on the fact that she got the present and someone else got something different.)
* "Një dhuratë (mua) më dha Marku." A present to me gave Mark."(no particular emphasis, but can be used to list different actions from different subjects.)
* "Një dhuratë (mua) Marku më dha." A present to me Mark (me) gave"(remembers that at least a present was given to her by Mark.)
* "Mua më dha Marku një dhuratë." To me (me) gave Mark a present." (is used when Mark gave something else to others.)
* "Mua një dhuratë më dha Marku." ["To me a present (me) gave Mark."(emphasis on "to me" and the fact that it was a present, only one present or it was something different from usual.)
* "Mua Marku një dhuratë më dha" ["To me Mark a present (me) gave."] (Mark gave her only one present.)
* "Mua Marku më dha një dhuratë" ["To me Mark (me) gave a present."] (puts emphasis on Mark. Probably the others didn't give her present, they gave something else or the present wasn't expected at all.)
In these examples, "(mua)" can be omitted when not in first position, causing a perceivable change in emphasis; the latter being of different intensity. "Më" is always followed by the verb. Thus, a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and two objects (a direct and an indirect one), can be
expressed in six different ways without "mua", and in twenty-four different ways with "mua", adding up to thirty possible combinations.
O'odham (Papago-Pima)
O'odham is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. It has free word order, with only the auxiliary bound to one spot. Here is an example, in literal translation:
* "Wakial 'o g wipsilo ha-cecposid." owboy is the calves them branding.(The cowboy is branding the calves.)
*"Wipsilo 'o ha-cecposid g wakial." alves is them branding the cowboy.
*"Ha-cecposid 'o g wakial g wipsilo."
hem Branding is the cowboy the calves.
A hem in sewing is a garment finishing method, where the edge of a piece of cloth is folded and sewn to prevent unravelling of the fabric and to adjust the length of the piece in garments, such as at the end of the sleeve or the bottom of the ga ...
*"Wipsilo 'o g wakial ha-cecposid." alves is the cowboy them branding.
*"Ha-cecposid 'o g wipsilo g wakial." hem branding is the calves the cowboy.
*"Wakial 'o ha-cecposid g wipsilo." [Cowboy is them branding the calves.]
These examples are all grammatically-valid variations on the sentence "The cowboy is branding the calves," but some are rarely found in natural speechm, as is discussed in Grammaticality.
Other issues with word order
Language change
Languages change over time. When language change involves a shift in a language's syntax, this is called syntactic change. An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution. In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct:
* "Martianus hæfde his sunu ær befæst." [Martianus had his son earlier established.] (Martianus had earlier established his son.)
* "Se wolde gelytlian þone lyfigendan hælend." [He would diminish the living saviour.]
This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage. Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example:
* "It was our selfe thou didst abuse."
A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic. There are some verbs, however, that are entirely acceptable in this format:
* "Are they good?"
This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic. This is due to the verb "to be", which acts as both Auxiliary verb, auxiliary and main verb. Similarly, other auxiliary and modal verbs allow for VSO word order ("Must he perish?"). Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage ("Did he buy the book?"). Shakespeare's usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before.
This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic language, Coptic, the language of the Christian Church in Egypt.
Dialectal variation
There are some languages where certain word order is preferred by one or more dialects, while others use a different order. One such case is Andean Spanish, spoken in Peru. While Spanish is classified as an SVO language, the variation of Spanish spoken in Peru has been influenced by contact with Quechua and Aymara, both SOV languages. This has had the effect of introducing OV (object-verb) word order into the clauses of some L1 Spanish speakers (moreso than would usually be expected), with more L2 speakers using similar constructions.
Poetry
Poetry and stories can use different word orders to emphasize certain aspects of the sentence. In English, this is called anastrophe. Here is an example:
"Kate loves Mark."
"Mark, Kate loves."
Here SVO is changed to OSV to emphasize the object.
Translation
Differences in word order complicate translation and language education – in addition to changing the individual words, the order must also be changed. The area in Linguistics that is concerned with translation and education is language acquisition. The reordering of words can run into problems, however, when transcribing stories. Rhyme scheme can change, as well as the meaning behind the words. This can be especially problematic when translating poetry.
See also
* Antisymmetry
* Information flow
*Language change
Notes
References
Further reading
A collection of papers on word order by a leading scholar, some downloadable clearly illustrated with examples.
*Bernard Comrie, ''Language universals, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology (linguistics), Morphology'' (1981) – this is the authoritative introduction to word order and related subjects. Order of Subject, Object, and Verb (PDF). A basic overview of word order variations across languages.
*Haugan, Jens ''Old Norse Word Order and Information Structure'' Norwegian University of Science and Technology. 2001.
*
*Song, Jae Jung (2012), ''Word Order''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. &
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Word order,
Syntactic relationships
Syntax