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Linguistic typology
Morphological
Isolating
Synthetic
Polysynthetic
Fusional
Agglutinative
Morphosyntactic
Alignment
Accusative
Ergative
Philippine
Active-stative
Tripartite
Inverse marking
Syntactic pivot
Theta role
Word Order
VO languages
Subject Verb Object
Verb Subject Object
Verb Object Subject
OV languages
Subject Object Verb
Object Subject Verb
Object Verb Subject
Time Manner Place
Place Manner Time
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In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the different ways in which languages arrange the constituents of their sentences relative to each other, and the systematic correspondences of between these arrangements. Linguistic Typology is an international Peer-reviewed journal in the field of Linguistic typology, founded in 1997 Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see Linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures In morphological typology (in linguistics an isolating language (also analytic language) is any Language in which words are composed of A synthetic language, in Linguistic typology, is a Language with a high Morpheme -per- word ratio Polysynthetic languages are highly Synthetic languages ie languages in which words are composed of many Morphemes Definition The degree of For fusion in Word formation, see Compound (linguistics. A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a An agglutinative language is a Language that uses Agglutination extensively most Words are formed by joining Morphemes together Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of Transitive verbs and those of Intransitive A nominative-accusative Language (or simply accusative language) is one that marks the direct object of Transitive verbs distinguishing them An ergative-absolutive Language (or simply ergative language is a language that treats the argument (" subject " of an Intransitive Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian -type voice system, is a typologically unusual Morphosyntactic alignment An active-stative language, or active language for short is one in which the sole argument of an Intransitive verb is sometimes marked in the same way A tripartite language, also called an ergative-accusative language, is one that treats the subject of an intransitive verb the subject of a transitive verb and the object A direct-inverse language is a language where clauses with transitive verbs can be expressed either using a direct or an inverse construction The syntactic pivot is the Verb argument around which sentences "revolve" in a given Language. In Generative grammar, (in particular Government and binding theory and the Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar a theta role or θ-role is the In Linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the Verb typically comes before the object (thus including SVO, VOS and In Linguistic typology, subject-verb-object ( SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first the Verb second and the object Verb Subject Object ( VSO) is a term in Linguistic typology. It represents one type of languages when classifying languages according to the sequence of these In Linguistic typology, Verb Object Subject or Verb Object Agent - commonly used in its abbreviated form VOS or VOA - represents the language-classification In Linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the Verb. In Linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and Verb of a sentence appear or usually Object Subject Verb (OSV or Object Agent Verb (OAV is one of the permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology. Object Verb Subject (OVS or Object Verb Agent (OVA is one of the Permutations of expression used in Linguistic typology, although it is rare among Time Manner Place (TMP describes one possible ordering of Adpositional phrases in sentences Place Manner Time is a term used in Linguistic typology to state the general order of Adpositional phrases in a language's sentences "to the store by car Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields 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[1]

For most languages that have a major class of nouns (not all do[2][3][4][5]) it is possible to define a basic word order in terms of the finite verb (V) and its arguments, subject (S) and object (O). There are six theoretically possible basic word orders: 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 OVS and OSV being significantly more rare than two preceding ones. [6]

Contents

Finding the basic word order

It is not always easy to find the basic word order of S, O and V. First, not all languages make use of the categories of subject and object. It is difficult to determine the order of elements one cannot identify in the first place. If subject and object can be identified, the problem can arise that different orders prevail in different contexts. For instance, French has SVO for nouns, but SOV when pronouns are involved; German has verb-medial order in main clauses, but verb-final order in subordinate clauses. In other languages the word order of transitive and intransitive clauses may not correspond. In Syntax, a transitive verb is a Verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs In Grammar, an intransitive Verb does not take an object. In more technical terms an intransitive verb has only one argument (its subject Russian, for example, has SVO transitive clauses but free order (SV or VS) in intransitive clauses. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages In order to have a valid base for comparison, the basic word order is defined as

While the first two of these requirements are relatively easy to respect, the latter two are more difficult. In spoken language, there are hardly ever two full nouns in a clause; the norm is for the clause to have at most one noun, the other arguments being pronouns. In written language, this is somewhat different, but that is of no help when investigating oral languages. Finally, the notion of "pragmatically neutral" is difficult to test. While the English sentence The king, they killed has a heavy emphasis on king, in other languages, that order (OSV) might not carry a significantly higher emphasis than another order.

If all the requirements above are met, it still sometimes turns out that languages do not seem to prefer any particular word order. The last resort is text counts, but even then, some languages must be analyzed as having two (or even more) word orders.

Sentence word orders

These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest:

Sometimes patterns are more complex: German, and Dutch have SOV in subordinates, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Dutch ( is a West Germanic language spoken by around 24 million people 22 million of which are from the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname Verb-second (V2 word order, in Syntax, is the rule in some languages that the second constituent of declarative main clauses is always a verb while this is not necessarily Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.

Others, such as Latin and Finnish, have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent, and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles, for example Puun kaatoi mies (tree-acc fell-perf man. This article deals with the Grammar of the Finnish language. It is probably best to read the main article first NOM) ~ A/the man felled the tree but puut kaatoivat miehet (tree-pl. nom/acc fell-perf-3p. pl man-pl. nom/acc) ~ The trees felled the men. 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.

Functions of sentence word order

A fixed or prototypical 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 arguments and other sentence constituents. A syntactic verb argument, in Linguistics, is a Phrase that appears in a relationship with the Verb in a Clause. In syntactic analysis a constituent is a word or a group of words that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical structure This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking or agreement, see also Marking. In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase For other meanings see the disambiguation page Marker In Linguistics, a marker is a free or bound Morpheme that indicates Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom coocurs with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian language[7].

Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). 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 particpants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject. In Historical linguistics, grammaticalisation (also known as grammaticisation or grammatisation) is a process of linguistic change by which a Content

The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: An overwhelming 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[8].


Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. In Linguistics, thematic relations express the meaning that a Noun phrase plays with respect to the action or state described by a sentence's verb If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we know that the language is strict accusative SOV, then we know that Grob smock Bzug probably means that Grob is the smocker and Bzug the entity smocked. However, since very strict word order is rare in practice, such applications of word order studies are rarely effective.

Phrase word orders and branching

Main articles: Branching (linguistics) and Head directionality parameter

The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. In Linguistics, branching is the general tendency towards a given order of Words within sentences and smaller grammatical units within sentences (such as The Head directionality parameter is a proposed parameter that classifies Word order. In Grammar, a clause is a word or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in some Languages and some types of Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. In grammatical theory, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a Phrase whose head is a Noun or a Pronoun, optionally accompanied An adpositional phrase is a Linguistics term that includes (a prepositional phrase(s (which are usually found in head-first languages like English) and Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun

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).

There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. In Grammar, a preposition is a Part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. 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 their heads, such as extraordinaire, which kept its position when it was borrowed from French. )

Free word order

Some languages do not have a fixed word order. In these languages there must be 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. 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 the latest in the pronominal system)[9]. Also there are cases of flexible rather than strict word order, usually these can be unambiguated using methods given above. Free-word-order languages include Latin, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Czech (ˈʧɛk čeština ˈʧɛʃcɪna in Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers it is the majority language in the Hungarian ( magyar nyelv) is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages

Other issues

In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions. However, most languages are generally assumed to have a basic word order, called the unmarked word order; other, marked word orders can then be used to emphasize a sentence element, to indicate modality (such as an interrogative modality), or for other purposes. Markedness is a linguistic concept that developed out of the Prague School (also known as the Prague linguistic circle) In Linguistics, modals are expressions broadly associated with notions of Possibility and Necessity. In Linguistics and grammar the interrogative mood is a Grammatical mood used for asking Questions by inflecting the main verb

For example, English is SVO (subject-verb-object), as in "I don't know this", but OSV is also possible: "This I don't know. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States According to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle, every sentence can be divided in two main constituents, one being the subject of the sentence and the For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. An object in Grammar is a Sentence element and part of the sentence predicate. " This process is called topic-fronting (or topicalization) and is common. A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its Syntax so that sentences have a topic–comment (or theme–rheme structure in which the In English, OSV is a marked word order because it emphasises the object, and is often accompanied by a change in intonation. In Linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch whilst speaking which is not used to distinguish words

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, and other non-standard word orders are also found in poetry in English, as well as other languages. .

Notes

  1. ^ Comrie, 1981
  2. ^ Hengeveld, Kees (1992). Non-verbal predication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  3. ^ Sasse, H. J. (1993) "Das Nomen - eine universelle Kategorie?” in Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 46 (3))
  4. ^ Jan Rijkhoff (2007) "Word Classes" Language and Linguistics Compass 1 (6) , 709–726 doi:10. 1111/j. 1749-818X. 2007. 00030. x
  5. ^ Rijkhoff, Jan (2004), "The Noun Phrase", Oxford University Press, ISBN 0199269645
  6. ^ Russel S. Tomlin;1986;Basic word order: Functional principles;London:Croom Helm
  7. ^ Comrie, 1981
  8. ^ Dryer, Matthew S. 1992. 'The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations', Language 68: 81-138
  9. ^ "Language Universals and linguistic typology", Bernard Comrie, 1981

Further reading

See also

Antisymmetry is a theory of syntactic linearization presented in Richard Kayne 's 1994 monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax. John A Hawkins is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.
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