Subject–verb–object


In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object 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 in unmarked sentences. The label is often used for ergative languages that do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object order. English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate oranges."
SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 75% of the world's languages. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially "obvious" to human psychology.
Languages regarded as SVO include: Albanian, Arabic dialects, Assyrian, Bosnian, Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Kiswahili, Luganda, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic, Igbo, Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Quiche, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai and Lao, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Yoruba and Zulu.
Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.

Properties

Subject–verb–object languages almost always place relative clauses after the nouns which they modify and adverbial subordinators before the clause modified, with varieties of Chinese being notable exceptions.
Although some subject–verb–object languages in West Africa, the best known being Ewe, use postpositions in noun phrases, the vast majority of them, such as English, have prepositions. Most subject–verb–object languages place genitives after the noun, but a significant minority, including the postpositional SVO languages of West Africa, the Hmong–Mien languages, some Sino-Tibetan languages, and European languages like Swedish, Danish, Lithuanian and Latvian have prenominal genitives.
Non-European languages, usually subject–verb–object languages, have a strong tendency to place adjectives, demonstratives and numerals after nouns that they modify, but Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian place numerals before nouns, as in English. Some linguists have come to view the numeral as the head in the
E relationship to fit the rigid right-branching of these languages.
There is a strong tendency, as in English, for main verbs to be preceded by auxiliaries: I am thinking. He should reconsider.

Sample sentences

An example of SVO order in English is:
In analytic languages such as English, subject–verb–object order is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. The situation is more complex in languages that have no word order imposed by their grammar; example: Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian, and Hungarian have both the VO and OV constructs in their common word order uses.
In some languages, some word orders are considered more "natural" than others. In some, the order is the matter of emphasis. For example, Russian allows the use of subject–verb–object in any order and "shuffles" parts to bring up a slightly different contextual meaning each time. E.g. "любит она его" may be used to point out "she acts this way because she LOVES him", or "его она любит" is used in the context "if you pay attention, you'll see that HE is the one she truly loves", or "его любит она" may appear along the lines "I agree that cat is a disaster, but since my wife adores it and I adore her...". Regardless of order, it is clear that "его" is the object because it is in the accusative case. In Polish, SVO order is basic in an affirmative sentence, and a different order is used to either emphasize some part of it or to adapt it to a broader context logic. For example, "Roweru ci nie kupię", "Od piątej czekam".
In Turkish, it is normal to use SOV, but SVO may be used sometimes to emphasize the verb. For example, "John terketti Mary'yi" is the answer to the question "What did John do with Mary?" instead of the regular sentence "John Mary'yi terketti".
In German, Dutch, and Kashmiri, SOV with V2 word order in main clauses coexists with SOV in subordinate clauses, as given in Example 1 below; and a change in syntax, such as by bringing an adpositional phrase to the front of the sentence for emphasis, may also dictate the use of VSO, as in Example 2. In Kashmiri, the word order in embedded clauses is conditioned by the category of the subordinating conjunction, as in Example 3.
  1. "Er weiß daß ich jeden Sonntag das Auto wasche."/"Hij weet dat ik elke zondag de auto was." Cf. the simple sentence "Ich wasche das Auto jeden Sonntag."/ "Ik was de auto elke zondag.", "I wash the car each Sunday."
  2. "Jeden Sonntag wasche ich das Auto."/"Elke zondag was ik de auto.". "Ich wasche das Auto jeden Sonntag."/"Ik was de auto elke zondag." translates perfectly into English "I wash the car each Sunday.", but as a result of changing the syntax, inversion SV->VS takes place.
  3. "mye ees phyikyir yithi.ni tsi temyis ciThy dyikh". If the embedded clause is introduced by the transparent conjunction zyi the SOV order changes to SVO. "mye ees phyikyir tsi maa dyikh temyis ciThy".
English developed from such a reordering language and still bears traces of this word order, for example in locative inversion and some clauses beginning with negative expressions: "only", "not only", "under no circumstances", "never", "on no account" and the like. In such cases, do-support is sometimes required, depending on the construction.