Subject Object Verb
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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 appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence.
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[edit] Incidence
Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by Subject Verb Object; the two types account for more than 75% of natural languages with a preferred order).[1] Languages that prefer SOV structure include Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Aymara, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Elamite, Hindi, Hittite, Hopi, Itelmen, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Kurdish, Manchu, Marathi, Mongolian, Navajo, Nepali, Nivkh, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Sinhalese and most other Indo-Iranian languages, Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages, Sumerian, Tamil, Tibetan, Telugu, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Urdu, Yukaghir, and virtually all Caucasian languages.
Standard Mandarin is SVO, however for simple sentences in clear context, word order is flexible enough to allow for SOV or OSV. German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" or, "I say something about Karl", is in SVO word order. When a conjunction like "dass", which corresponds to "that" in English, is used; the verb appears at the end of the sentence, rendering the word order SOV. A possible such sentence is "Ich sage, dass Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat", or, translated into English word-for-word, "I say that Karl a belt bought has", hence, SOV word order.
[edit] Properties
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. SOV languages often have case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows them to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. 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.
[edit] Examples
An example in Japanese:
| Sentence | 私は箱を開けます。 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Words | 私 | は | 箱 | を | 開けます。 |
| Romaji | watashi | wa | hako | o | akemasu. |
| Gloss | I | (tpc) | box | (obj) | open |
| Parts | Subject | Object | Verb | ||
| Translation | I open the box. | ||||
The markers は (wa) and を (o) are, respectively, topic and object markers for the words that precede them. Technically, the sentence can be translated a number of ways ("a box", "the boxes", etc), but this does not affect the SOV analysis.
Similarly, in Burmese, an analytic language, the word order is SOV. For example:
| Sentence | ငာ စက္ကူဘူးကုိ ဖ္ဝင့္တယ္ | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Words | ငာ | စက္ကူဘူး | ကုိ | ဖ္ဝင့္ | တယ္ |
| IPA | ŋà | seʔkù bú | gò | pʰwì̃ | dè |
| Gloss | I | box | (particle)1 | open | (particle)2 |
| Parts | Subject | Object | Verb | ||
| Translation | I open the box. | ||||
1 Postpositional marker indicating objective case.
2 Particle indicating present tense.
Although Latin is an inflected language, the most usual word order is SOV. For example:
| Sentence | Servus puellam amat | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Words | Servus | puellam | amat |
| Gloss | Slave (nom) | girl (acc) | loves |
| Parts | Subject | Object | Verb |
| Translation | The slave loves the girl. | ||
Again, there are multiple valid translations ("a slave", etc) that do not affect the overall analysis.
[edit] See also
- Topic-prominent language
- Subject Verb Object
- Object Subject Verb
- Object Verb Subject
- Verb Object Subject
- Verb Subject Object
[edit] References
- ^ Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55967-7.
