Word Order
In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are the constituent order of a clause – the relative order of subject, object, and verb; the order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun phrase; and the order of adverbials.
Some languages have relatively restrictive word orders, often relying on the order of constituents to convey important grammatical information. Others, often those that convey grammatical information through inflection, allow more flexibility which can be used to encode pragmatic information such as topicalisation or focus. Most languages however have some preferred word order which is used most frequently.
For most nominative–accusative languages which have a major word class of nouns and clauses which include subject and object, constituent word order is commonly defined in terms of the finite verb (V) and its arguments, the subject (S) and object (O).
There are six theoretically possible basic word orders for the transitive sentence: subject–verb–object (SVO), subject–object–verb (SOV), verb–subject–object (VSO), verb–object–subject (VOS), object–subject–verb (OSV) and object–verb–subject (OVS). The overwhelming majority of the world's languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with VOS being slightly more common than OSV, and OVS being significantly more rare than the two preceding orders.
Read more about Word Order: Finding The Basic Constituent Order, Constituent Word Orders, Functions of Constituent Word Order, Phrase Word Orders and Branching, Pragmatic Word Order, Other Issues
Other articles related to "word order, word orders, words, word, order":
... Scrambling is a common term for pragmatic word order ... In the Chomskyan tradition, word orders of all languages are taken to be derived from a common source with a fundamental word order, so languages which do not follow a set pattern can be said to be "scrambled" from "no ... beyond the Chomskyan tradition and become a general concept that denotes many non-canonical word orders in numerous languages ...
... The standard word order for Franco-Provençal is subject–verb–object (SVO) form in a declarative sentence, for example Vos côsâds anglès ... (You speak English.), except when the object is a pronoun, in which case the word order is subject–object–verb (SOV) ... verb–subject–object (VSO) form is standard word order for an interrogative sentence, for example Côsâds-vos anglès ? (Do you speak English?) ...
... which have to follow the deficient verb(s) in word order ... The bullets • are used here to join the parts of single words which would have been written separately in the current disjunctive orthography) Apart from the verbal complex, researchers of Bantu languages have ... the final, penult, or antepenultimate syllable of the following word, but only if that word is the verb's object ...
... known as pied-piping with inversion, which may change the head-initial order of phrases such as NP, PP, and QP ...
... Differences in word order complicate translation and language education – in addition to changing the individual words, the order must also be changed ... by first translating the individual words, then reordering the sentence, as in interlinear gloss, or by reordering the words prior to translation, as in English-Ordered ...
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