Subject Object Verb
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
18:45, 12 December 2006 (UTC)18:45, 12 December 2006 (UTC)~~
In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence. Among natural languages, SOV is the most common type. The SOV languages include Armenian,Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Ainu, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Itelmen, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Burushaski, Basque, Latin, Bengali, Burmese, Tibetan, Amharic, Tigrinya, Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Kabardian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hindi, Navajo, Hopi, Aymara, Quechua, Pāli, Nepali, Sinhalese and most other Indian languages.
German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. See V2 word order. French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are SVO, but use SOV when a pronoun is used as the (direct or indirect) object: e.g., "Sam a mangé des oranges", "Sam comeu laranjas" or "Sam comió naranjas" or "Sam ha mangiato delle arance" (Sam ate oranges) would become "Sam les a mangés", "Sam as comeu" or "Sam las comió" or "Sam le ha mangiate" (Sam them ate). This type of ordering is sometimes (although rarely) used in English under poetic license, especially in works of William Shakespeare.
Although Russian usually employs the SVO structure in transitive сlauses, like, for instance, "я копаю яму" (I'm digging a hole), Russian, like other Slavic languages, does not place strict rules on the order of words in a sentence; its being an inflected language helps make clear the object of the clause (in this case via the accusative declension). Thus, there are several different ways the clause can be said, whose subject can even be dropped since the verb's conjugation makes it obvious who or what the subject is. "Яму копаю" is one way of saying it differently; the clause may also be said as "копаю яму я." The meaning remains the same, yet the context may change.
SOV languages have a strong tendency to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb, to place genitive noun phrases before the possessed noun, to place a name before a title or honorific ("James Uncle" and "Johnson Doctor" rather than "Uncle James" and "Doctor Johnson"), and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals SOV word order, though the reverse does not hold: SOV languages feature prenominal and postnominal relative clauses roughly equally. Some have special particles to distinguish the subject and the object, such as the Japanese ga and o. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases. Within Eurasia SOV languages often (but not always, e.g. not ordinarily in Persian) place adjectives before the nouns they modify, and this is often cited as a universal tendency of SOV languages; however, outside Eurasia SOV languages usually place adjectives after the modified noun.
An example in Japanese is: 私は箱を開けます。(watashi wa hako o akemasu.) meaning "I open a/the box/boxes." In this sentence, 私 (watashi) is the subject (or more specifically, topic) meaning "I" as in first person singular, and it is followed by the は (wa) topic-marker. 箱 (hako) is the object meaning box (in Japanese no distinction is made between whether a word uses "a" or "the", or plural or singular unless specifically stated), followed by を (o) which is the object-marker in Japanese. 開けます (akemasu) is the polite non-past form of the verb which means "to open" and is at the end of the sentence. Typical polite usage habitually suppresses direct reference to persons, preferring instead verbs of implied direction: 本を下さい (hon o kudasai, "Please give me the book"), a literal approximation for which might be, "hand the book down, please," although the English is far too breezy in tone.
Although Latin is an inflected language, the most usual word order was SOV. An example would be: "servus puellam amat", meaning "The slave loves the girl." In this sentence, "servus" is the subject, "puellam" is the object and "amat" is the verb.
