| Word order |
English equivalent |
Proportion of languages |
Example languages |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOV | "I you love." | 45% |
|
Hindi, Japanese, Latin |
| SVO | "I love you." | 42% |
|
English, Mandarin, Russian |
| VSO | "Love I you." | 9% |
|
Hebrew, Irish, Zapotec |
| VOS | "Love you I." | 3% |
|
Baure, Fijian, Malagasy |
| OVS | "You love I." | 1% |
|
Apalai, Hixkaryana, Tamil |
| OSV | "You I love." | 0% | Jamamadi, Warao, Xavante | |
Frequency distribution of word order in languages
surveyed by Russell S. Tomlin.[1][2]
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. It is the second most common order found in the world, after SOV, and together, they account for more than 75% of the world's languages.[3] It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology.[4]
Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Italian, Ganda, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Javanese, Kashmiri, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Quiche, Rotuman, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese and Yoruba are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. The label is often used for ergative languages which do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object order. The Romance languages also follow SVO construction, except for certain constructions in many of them in which a pronoun functions as the object (e.g. French: je t'aime, Italian: (io) ti amo or Spanish: (yo) te amo, meaning "I you love" in English). All of the Scandinavian languages follow this order also but change to VSO when asking a question. Arabic and Hebrew will occasionally use an SVO pattern with sentences with subject pronouns (e.g. Arabic أنا أحبك, Hebrew: אני אוהב אותך, lit. "I love you."). However the subject pronouns here are grammatically unnecessary and most other constructions suggest that both languages are VSO languages at their core, though Modern Hebrew generally uses SVO construction as well as the modern varieties of Arabic. Other SVO 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:
In this, Andy is the subject, ate is the verb, oranges is the object.
Some languages are more complicated: Russian allows all possible combinations SVO, OVS, SOV, OSV, VSO, VOS. Changing the word order influences the nuance of the meaning. Usually the last word in a sentence is emphasized. But other implications are possible. Varying word order is very common in Russian. Finnish and Hungarian word order is similar. While SVO is considered "regular," it often changes to emphasize a different part of the sentence. In Polish, a word/phrase can be brought to the front or, less commonly, put to the back of a sentence or clause to add emphasis e.g. "Roweru ci nie kupię" (I won't buy you a bicycle), "Od piątej czekam" (I've been waiting since five).[5]
In German and in Dutch, SVO in main clauses coexists with SOV in subordinate clauses, as given in Example 1 below; and a change in syntax – for instance, by bringing an adpositional phrase to the front of the sentence for emphasis – may also dictate the use of VSO, as in Example 2. (See V2 word order.)
Example 1: "Er weiß, dass ich jeden Sonntag das Auto wasche" (German: "He knows I wash the car every Sunday", lit. "He knows, that I every Sunday the car wash"). Cf the simple sentence "Ich wasche das Auto jeden Sonntag", "I wash the car every Sunday".
Example 2: "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 a reordering language, 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 like.
Subject–verb–object languages almost always place relative clauses after the nouns they modify and adverbial subordinators before the clause modified, with Chinese as a notable exception.
Although some subject–verb–object languages in West Africa, the best-known being Ewe, use postpositions in noun phrases, the vast majority have prepositions like English does. Most subject–verb–object languages place genitives after the noun, though there is a significant minority, including the postpositional SVO languages of West Africa, the Hmong–Mien languages, some Sino-Tibetan languages, and such European languages as Swedish, Danish, Lithuanian and Latvian, that have prenominal genitives[6] (as would be expected in a SOV language).
Outside of Europe, subject–verb–object languages have a strong tendency to place adjectives, demonstratives, and numerals after the noun they modify, though Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Malay place numerals before nouns as English does. Some linguists have come to actually view the numeral as the head in this relationship to fit the rigid right-branching of these languages.[7]