Talk:Subject Verb Object

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[edit] Change Log

I moved this from Subject-verb-object to Subject Verb Object because that was the format the other five permutations were in, and it was silly to have this one have a title with different punctuation and capitalization. -Branddobbe 04:54, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)

I removed the mention of Klingon and Yoda because it was totally unrelated to SVO. (In fact, the inclusion of the note assumed that SVO is 'normal' against Klingon's 'abnormal' order, when in fact SVO is only the second most common order, if we are to believe the article.) -Bathrobe

Which is the most common order? The SVO and SOV articles have SOV on top, while the others have SVO on top.

There were untitled sections at the top of this page, from contributions spanning at least three years . I've taken the liberty to title these. I also changed the resulting sort order to put change notifications at the top (this and the next two sections). Please feel free to remedy my edits! Robbiemuffin (talk) 11:45, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] proposed move

I propose moving all six word-order articles, changing the word 'subject' to 'agent'. There are two motivations for this: Not all languages have subjects (ergative languages, for example), and among those that do, not all order A the same way they order S (Russian, for example, which if I remember correctly has fixed transitive AVO order but fluid intransitive SV~VS order). kwami 21:49, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay, 5 days, no comments, here goes. kwami 11:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Are AVO, AOV, etc. common terms? It's all right to rename them if they are common (or becoming common) among linguists. By the way, according to SIL's glossary, predicator may be a preferred term to verb because the latter is a part of speech rather than a function in a sentence. Do linguists use the former? In fact, in my native language Japanese, both verbs and adjectives can be predicators. - TAKASUGI Shinji 10:30, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
SVO etc are most often seen, but AVO or AVP (P for 'patient') is becoming more widespread, especially when people are trying to be rigorous.
Yes, terms like 'predicator' (there are others) may be preferable in some situations, but they're not important here. Every language has verbs, especially in the highly transitive clauses this typology is based on.
By the way, I don't think I'd say adjectives can predicators in Japanese. I can think of only one word that behaves as an adjective, onazi, and it requires a copula as predicate. I'd consider words like aoi to be verbs. They certainly act like verbs. kwami 12:46, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't think it's fair to treat those Japanese words ending with -i as verbs just because they don't look like English adjectives. Adjectives are something between nouns and verbs, and in European languages they are more like nouns and in East Asian languages (at least in Japanese and Chinese) they are more like verbs. They in fact have several features in common: they are more commonly used as noun modifiers, they can be often converted to adverbs, and they inflect differently from both nouns and verbs. Onaji is considered an irregular word. - TAKASUGI Shinji 15:03, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough. It's hard to define something that won't keep still. kwami 23:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
You might be interested in the following book: Adjective Classes: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, edited by R.M.W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald.
This pioneering work shows, among other things, that the grammatical properties of the adjective class may be similar to nouns or verbs or both or neither; that some languages have two kinds of adjectives, one hard to distinguish from nouns and the other from verbs; that the adjective class can sometimes be large and open, and in other cases small and closed.
Japanese has verb-like noun-modifiers such as ao-i (blue) and taka-i (high) and noun-like noun-modifiers such as yutaka-na (rich) and kirei-na (beautiful). The former is commonly called adjectives. Japanese does have stative verbs too, such as iru (to be necessary).
According to Katsumi Matsumoto, transition between noun-like adjectives and verb-like adjectives is found among Tibetan languages, whose location is between Western languages (Indo-European, Dravidian, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, etc.), which have noun-like adjectives, and Eastern languages (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Ainu, Miao-Yao, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, New Guinean, Na-Dene, etc.), which have verb-like adjectives. - TAKASUGI Shinji 02:07, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, there is definitely an areal feature involved.
However, that's an extremely POV book. It was based on a roundtable discussion D&A convened for the purpose of establishing adjectives as a universal category in the world's languages. Everyone was to write an article showing how adjectives worked in the languages they worked on. The problem is that some of their languages clearly lacked an adjective category, and those articles were excluded from the book. That is, Dixon censored the data to bolster his hypothesis! Although there is some interesting data, the book can hardly be taken seriously. kwami 19:11, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. - TAKASUGI Shinji 23:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Sure.
I'm thinking I should have worded that differently. If challenged, I wouldn't say that Japanese either has or does not have a category 'adjective', just that it's unclear what 'adjective' means cross-linguistically. And I'm sure many of the articles in the book are very good. Several of them, however, were rewritten under pressure from Dixon, so that what some people said at the conference (things like 'it is not clear if the concept of adjective is applicable') and what they ended up publishing ('X are adjectives') were two very different things. kwami 01:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Why don't you use the term patient instead of object? I've seen both agent-object-verb and agent-patient-verb, and the latter seems more consistent. A subject and an object form a pair syntactically, and an agent and a patient form a pair semantically. - TAKASUGI Shinji 05:09, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

That would be fine. Go ahead and change it if you wish. It would also avoid the ambiguity of direct vs indirect objects. I only left it as is because 'object' is a more familiar term.
I wonder if it might not be a good idea to merge all these articles into a single article, maybe constituent order. This might forstall objections to the 'new' terms. What do you think? kwami 05:58, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm afraid the term constituent order is too broad. We would then discuss all the constituent orders, not only agent-patient-verb and agent-verb-patient but also time-manner-place vs. place-manner-time, genitive-noun vs. noun-genitive, adjective-noun vs. noun-adjective, and so on. That would be a great article if we include all of them, of course. - TAKASUGI Shinji 11:37, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed move back to SOV

This article has been moved to Agent Verb Object from Subject Verb Object. I suggest undoing this move for the following reasons:

- It is not attested in the literature on word order (The terminology is attested in the literature on case, but that is another matter. Note that Comrie-style discussion of case (SAP) is more common than RMW Dixon-style (SAO))

Either SAO or SAP would be acceptable. kwami

- The reasons for this is that the agent can be moved around quite freely in the sentence by various morphosyntactuc means, while the subject cannot. Compare

1) the girl hits the ball

and

2) the ball is hit by the girl

The order is SOV in both sentences, but AVP in the first and PVA in the second.

Word-order typology looks at "basic" phrase order. Therefore passives are not usually considered. But in any case, in your examples the word orders are AVP and SV; a passive is intransitive by definition. kwami

- The original motivation that ergative languages have no subject is clearly wrong. Ergative languages are defined by the fact that their subjects are marked by the absolutive, in distinction to the object, which is marked by the ergative

No, there is no clarity about this at all. Erg langs are defined by their treating S and O similarly in opposition to A, not by what they do to "subjects". A large amount of the lit claim that the subject is the argument marked by the ergative rather than the absolutive, while others claim that there is no subject at all in such languages. Certainly there is no agreement as to what the subject should be. kwami

- I am aware of no language that has a fixed order of A, whereas there are tons that have a fixed order of S. In the original claim for the move, Russian was said to only allow AVO in transitive sentences. I am no expert in Russian, but as a good IE-language, it should have a passivization strategy to demote the agent to object. This would make the agent surface after the verb.

Jasyjatere 11:17, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

You can only have AVO in transitive sentences because you can only have A or O in transitive sentences. Not sure what your point is. And again, few langs have rigid word orders, but the lit still discusses langs based on their "basic" word order. (That's often problematic, of course.) kwami 18:57, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I think there at least should be uniformity, within the article and similar articles. I think this is the only article in the series using "agent" looking rather silly and distracting. 惑乱 分からん 08:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Not to mention that 'agent' has a very specific meaning with regard to thematic roles, and is thus potentially quite confusing. I think I'll move this back now. BovineBeast 18:17, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, please move it back pronto. The AVO title satisfies only certain linguists. The most common term in basic linguistic literature is still SVO. Not to mention that the most common linkage here is SVO, not AVO.
Peter Isotalo 14:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
Support. Let's move it back to SVO, the above reasons seem good enough. --Cameltrader 06:38, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
No objections so far, so I'm restoring it. --Cameltrader 15:33, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Moved, following the consensus apparent on this page. If anyone disagrees with this, please instigate a move request to enable a full discussion to clarify what the consensus position is. --Stemonitis 16:01, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Specific Languages

If Chinese (I know it is so for Mandarin at least) is cited on the talk as SVO, shouldn't it also be in the article?

English, German, Kiswahili and Chinese are examples of languages that follow this pattern.

German is mixed SVO / SOV, certainly not a typical SVO language. --Taw

ISTR that German main clauses are more precisely V2 ("verb second"), that is, Tv{SO}V, where T is a "topic", v is a single verb, S and O are any nouns left over, and V is any part of the verb phrase left over from v. --Damian Yerrick

what about french? any french grammar buffs?

French is SVO.

Is the paragraph on Hebrew really necessary? It starts out by saying that Hebrew isn't of this gorup, so it seems pointless to then go on and describe why not. Tev 21:44, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Use in Poetry, etc

Is it worth mentioning that, in addition to being used for effect in fiction, such sequences are found in poetry? Vicki Rosenzweig

Yes. Could all these OSV / SVO / etc pages be merged to one general article? They seem to all cover common ground. (not sure what we'd call it though)-- Tarquin
I concur. Having a 'mother page' listing the possible permutations and giving some general information on this kind of linguistic typology is a good idea, I think. I propose Constituent order - that seems to me to be the general notion. However, I'm not a syntactician so I won't carry out the move. - Strangeloop (talk) 09:20, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I also agree. Perhaps Word order would be the right place -- it already exists and has this kind of content. In particular, duplicating the ranks of the various orders is a dead giveaway that something needs mergine, because over time they will diverge. I won't do it for the same reason. -- Dwheeler
This still might be a good idea. Constituent order is the normal cover term. kwami 23:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Some of these languages, such as English, can also use an OSV structure in certain literary styles, such as poetry.

Can we get an example or reference for this? I can easily envision OVS but OSV is fairly abstract in English. Robbiemuffin (talk) 11:52, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

"I played a game of Go yesterday."

I found this confusing as 'Go' can be a verb. Couldn't it be 'football', 'chess' or something?

[edit] SOV vs SVO

The article and Subject Object Verb state that SOV is more popular than SVO. What's the source of this claim ? Taw 18:29, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Second most common???

The article says:

"This sequence is the second most common." But no source is given to support this assertion. Moreover, none of the articles for the other sequences claim to be the most common. Also, there's not a definition for what "most common" means. Does this mean that there are the most total languages (no matter how few speakers they might have) which use this sequence, or that there are the most total speakers of the languages in this group. I haven't done any sort of detailed population analysis, but I'm pretty sure that the SVO sequence is the most common by the latter definition. Since the languages which use this sequence include Chinese, the Maylay-Indonesian languages, several other Asian languages with a lot of speakers, English, the Romance languages, Russian (and presumably most of the other Slavic languages), and a number of others (including some major African languages), I'm pretty certain that this adds up to at the very least a plurality, if not an outright majority of the world's population!

So I'm going to change it to "the most common" unless someone can give a good reason as to why it's not. 172.160.184.114 07:02, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

It's as silly to call it the most common as it is to call it the second most common. We don't even know how many languages there are in the world, let alone exactly what percentage of languages are of which word order type. (Even the ones we do know a lot about can be controversial!) I've read in more than one place that SOV seems to have a slight edge over SVO, but the first relevant reference book at hand (David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, second edition) takes a decidedly agnostic approach, saying only that "over 75% of the world's languages use SVO... or SOV", and not taking a stand on which of those two is the more popular. Barring a typological breakthrough, I think Crystal's is the only defensible position to take on the matter, and am editing accordingly. (And of course "most popular" means "number of languages using the order", not "number of speakers" - the fact that a couple of the SVO languages have, through accidents of history, gained large numbers of speakers tells us nothing useful about language.) 69.140.12.199 20:19, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
'Most common' is generally understood to mean 'greatest number of languages'.
Can't dig up a ref, but it's been estimated that, of languages which even have a basic constituent order, approx. 1/2 are AOV, 1/3 AVO, and 1/6 VAO. However, that doesn't seem to account for the large number of Austronesian languages which are basically OVA, perhaps because this O is (or at least was) routinely called the "subject" of the "passive voice". There are also languages, such as the Kru and Mande languages of West Africa, which are AXOV, where X is an auxiliary verb and V is a lexical verb. It's debatable whether these languages should be considered AVO, or AOV, or if they don't fit into either category. kwami 23:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Jae Jung Song' introductionary book Linguistic Typology: Morphology and syntax (2001, p.106)says:
"(...) Tomlin (1986) provides the following frequency hierarchy of the six clausal word orders:
(62) SOV = SVO > VSO > VOS = OVS > OSV"
But also(same book, p.24):
"Dryer (1989: 269-270) demonstrates that there s indeed a linguistic preference for SOV over SVO, and that the lack of a statistical difference between SOV and SVO in Tomlin's investigation is due to the distinction between linguistic preferences and actual frequencies of different linguistic types not being maintained. For example, in Tomlin's sample about 40 per cent of the SVO languages come from Niger-Congo, and there is also a large contigent of SVO languages fron Austronesian (Dryer 1989: 260, 270)"
Are you people discussing the same question here? Are you trying to find out which word order is the most frequently found in the world's languages, or which of the basic word orders is the linguistically preferred one? This may seem as one and the same thing, but isn't. Some language families are larger than others, not because of the languages themselves, but because of different historical, and linguistically -or at least typologically- irrelevant factors, such as migration, colonialization etc.
The linguistically preferred types are the ones that are preferred by human languages; that is, preferred by the largest number of languages that are unrelated, with the distribution of the types not being due to crosslinguistic contact. Linguistic univerals is about "what human languages (tend to) have in common because they are human languages", and not "what human languages (tend to) have in common because we all know English", so to say.
Two more things:
1: Why are you dragging the poetic word orders and the derived word orders (questions etc) into this article? Shouldn't it be about basic word order?
2: Of course this article can't list all SVO languages as examples. There may be plus/minus 7000 languages in the world, and the majority of them are SOV/SVO. ("Wow, my language is SVO too! Cool, I'll put it on the list of examples!")
I don't know how to edit articles, so I won't try to edit this article. Hope some of you other guys will, though. 129.240.183.108 14:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC) Elisabeth Holm


[edit] AOV in AVO article?

Why does this article even mention the AOV order? Then, it gives so many examples of languages the use the AOV order. As I was reading this article, I got confused and thought it meant AVO, since that is the title. Does anyone else feel that the mention and examples of AOV should be removed?--El aprendelenguas 22:14, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully that should clarify it. The examples are all AVO. kwami 23:29, 17 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Russian

I'm no linguist, but would greatly appreciate if someone could clarify something for me. In Russian, while "Sam ate (the) oranges" is certainly proper, it can be said "Sam (the) oranges ate" - this emphasizes "who", or "Ate (the) oranges Sam" - this also emphasizes "who", or "(The) oranges Sam ate" - this emphasizes "what", or even "(The) oranges ate Sam" - this, again, emphasizes "what", and so on. It seems to me that, unlike in English, this structure (SVO) is very flexible in Russian. Are there other languages with such flexibility? With respect, Ko Soi IX 08:42, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Definitely, for instance Latin, Finnish, and Hungarian (see word order#Sentence word orders). I am no linguist either, but I believe all Slavic languages (Russian included) have the that flexibility as well. --Cameltrader 21:05, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. With respect, Ko Soi IX 02:01, 25 April 2007 (UTC)