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. Together with the SOV order, SVO is one of the two most common orders, accounting for more than 75% of the world's languages between them.[1] It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages[citation needed], suggesting[who?] that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology (possibly through 'physical metaphor', as in the case of a thrown object, where attention naturally passes from a thrower (subject) to the path of a flying object (verb) and then to the target (object)). However, this has not been scientifically examined.
English, informal Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, Russian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay, Latvian, Rotuman and Indonesian are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. The Romance languages also follow SVO construction, except for constructions in many of the languages where a pronoun functions as the object (eg. French: Je t'aime or Spanish: Te amo lit. you I love). All of the Scandinavian languages follow this order also but change to VSO when asking a question. Some of these languages, such as English, can also use an OSV structure in certain literary styles, such as poetry.
An example of SVO order in English is:
- Andy ate oranges.
In this, Andy is the subject, ate is the verb, oranges is the object.
Some languages are more complicated: in German and in Dutch, SVO in main clauses coexists with SOV in subordinate clauses (See V2 word order.)
Example: "Elke Zondag was ik de auto" (Dutch: "Every Sunday I wash the car", lit. "Every Sunday wash I the car"). "Ik was de auto elke Zondag" translates perfectly into English "I wash the car every Sunday", but as a result of changing the syntax, inversion SV->VS takes place.
English developed from such languages itself, and still bears traces of this word order, for example in locative inversion ("In the garden sat a cat") and some clauses beginning with negative expressions: "only" ("only then do we find X"), "not only" ("not only did he storm away, but he also slammed the door"), "under no circumstances" ("under no circumstances are the students allowed to use a mobile phone"), "on no account" and the likes.
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources
- ^ Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55967-7.
