Subject Verb Object
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In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO), is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. The SVO and Subject Object Verb orders are by far the two most common, accounting for more than 75% of the world's languages which have a preferred order.[1] English[2], Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, the Romance languages, Russian, Bulgarian, Kiswahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay, Rotuman and Indonesian are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. Icelandic follows this order also but changes to VSO when asking a question.
An example of SVO order in English is:
- Sam ate the oranges.
In this, Sam is the subject, ate is the verb, the oranges is the object.
Some languages are more complicated: in German and in Dutch, an ancestral SOV order is retained in subordinate clauses even though SVO is the unmarked order in main declarative clauses. (See V2 word order.) English developed from such languages itself, and still bears traces of this word order, for example in the case of reported speech, e.g. "Oranges," said Sam, although such usage is itself in decline in favour of SVO Sam said "Oranges."
[edit] Sources
- ^ Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55967-7.
- ^ OSV is also used, largely in poetry.
