Pragmatic Word Order
Some languages do not have a fixed word order. In these languages there is often a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments; however there are also languages in which word order is fixed even though the degree of marking would enable free word order, and languages with free word order, such as some varieties of Datooga, which have free word order combined with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments. Typologically there is a trend that highly animate actors are more likely to be topical than low-animate undergoers, this trend would come through even in free-word-order languages giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS in the case of ergative systems, however ergative systems do not usually extend to the highest levels of animacy, usually giving way to some form of nominative system at least in the pronominal system). Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders such as Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian (in intransitive clauses), and Finnish. In some of those, a canonical order can still be identified, but in others this is not possible.
Read more about this topic: Word Order
Famous quotes containing the words pragmatic, word and/or order:
“Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for a God on modern men’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 14:36.
“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.... And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant ...; therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)