Word order


In linguistics, word order typology is the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are
Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information. Other languages—often those that convey grammatical information through inflection—allow more flexible word order, which can be used to encode pragmatic information, such as topicalisation or focus. However, even languages with flexible word order have a preferred or basic word order, with other word orders considered "marked".
Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb in combination with two arguments, namely the subject, and object. Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders:
These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest :
Sometimes patterns are more complex: some Germanic languages have SOV in subordinate clauses, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.
Many synthetic languages such as Latin, Greek, Persian, Romanian, Assyrian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, and Basque have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance.
Topic-prominent languages organize sentences to emphasize their topic–comment structure. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin and Turkish, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses. Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. Thus, Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. In such an approach, the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For example, Mayan languages have been described with the rather uncommon VOS word order. However, they are ergative–absolutive languages, and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where the S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb. Indeed, many languages that some thought had a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.

Distribution of word order types

Every language falls under one of the six word order types; the unfixed type is somewhat disputed in the community, as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct.
The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer. The 2005 study surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies.
Word OrderNumber Percentage Number Percentage
SOV49740.5%56541.0%
SVO43535.4%48835.4%
VSO856.9%956.9%
VOS262.1%251.8%
OVS90.7%110.8%
OSV40.3%40.3%
UNFIXED17214.0%18913.7%

Hammarström calculated the constituent orders of 5252 languages in two ways. His first method, counting languages directly, yielded results similar to Dryer's studies, indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution. However, when stratified by language families, the distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure, meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure.
Word OrderNo. of LanguagesPercentageNo. of FamiliesPercentage
SOV227543.3%23956.6%
SVO211740.3%5513.0%
VSO5039.5%276.3%
VOS1743.3%153.5%
OVS400.7%30.7%
OSV190.3%10.2%
UNFIXED1242.3%266.1%

Functions of constituent word order

Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.
Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information tends to precede new information. Furthermore, acting participants are more likely to be talked about than things simply undergoing actions. If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.
The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V, however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.

Semantics of word order

In many languages, standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis. In languages such as O'odham and Hungarian, which are discussed below, almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical, but not all of them are used.. In languages such as English and German, word order is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences:
A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt wen?'
B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark is der, den sie liebt'
C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?'
In, the first sentence shows the word order used for wh-questions in English and German. The second sentence is an echo question; it would only be uttered after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question. One could replace the word wen with an identifier such as Mark: 'Kate liebt Mark?' . In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify the sentence as a question.
In, the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in. The second sentence emphasises that Kate does indeed love Mark, and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love. However, a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech, be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer the echo question in simply by restating: Mark!. This is the same for both languages.
In yes–no questions such as, English and German use subject-verb inversion. But, whereas English relies on do-support to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries, German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions, even from lexical verbs.
This notwithstanding, English, as opposed to German, has very strict word order. In German, word order can be used as a means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In Questions, V1 word order is used. And lastly, dependent clauses use verb-final word order. However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on the placement of the subject and object, even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed.
To say that German is an SVO language would be completely wrong. A sentence such as 'Cäsar besiegte Pompejus' will always be ambiguous in German.

Phrase word orders and branching

The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun.
Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions, postpositions, or both.
There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For SVO languages, either order is common.
For example, French uses prepositions , and places adjectives after . However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads . On the other hand, in English adjectives almost always go before nouns , and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common . Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation.

Pragmatic word order

Some languages have no fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However, some languages use a fixed word order even if they provide a degree of marking that would support free word order. Also, some languages with free word order, such as some varieties of Datooga, combine free word order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments.
Typologically, highly-animate actors are more likely topical than low-animate undergoers, a trend that would come through even in languages with free word order languages. That a statistical bias for SO order.
Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Latin, Albanian, and O'odham. In some languages, a general word order can be identified, but is much harder in others. When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the rheme.

Hungarian

The word order in Hungarian sentences is changed according to the speaker's communicative intentions. Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence, distinguishing the emphatic part that carries new information from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information.
The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb.
For "Kate ate a piece of cake", the possibilities are:
  1. "Kati megevett egy szelet tortát."
  2. "Egy szelet tortát Kati evett meg."
  3. "Kati evett meg egy szelet tortát."
  4. "Kati egy szelet tortát evett meg."
  5. "Egy szelet tortát evett meg Kati."
  6. "Megevett egy szelet tortát Kati."
  7. "Megevett Kati egy szelet tortát."
The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that the order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above. These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged.
Note that the emphasis can be on the action itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action, as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb, then the co-verb is separated from the verb, and always follows the verb. Also note that the enclitic -t marks the direct object: 'torta' + '-t' -> 'tortát'.

Portuguese

In Portuguese, clitic pronouns and commas allow many different orders:
Braces are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns, which may be implicit in Portuguese. Because of conjugation, the grammatical person is recovered.

Latin

In Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles.
The Subject, Verb, and Object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often the verb comes last. Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question:
Latin prose often follows the word order "Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb", but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify, but some categories, such as those that determine or specify, usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion.

Albanian

Due to the presence of grammatical cases applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, the Albanian language permits a large number of positional combination of words. In spoken language a word order differing from the most common S-V-O helps the speaker putting emphasis on a word, thus changing partially the message delivered. Here is an example:
In these examples, "" can be omitted when not in first position, causing a perceivable change in emphasis; the latter being of different intensity. "Më" is always followed by the verb. Thus, a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and two objects, can be
expressed in six different ways without "mua", and in twenty-four different ways with "mua", adding up to thirty possible combinations.

O'odham (Papago-Pima)

O'odham is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. It has free word order, with only the Auxiliary bound to one spot. Here is an example, in literal translation:
These examples are all grammatically-valid variations on the sentence, "The cowboy is branding the calves," though some are rarely found in natural speech. This is discussed in Grammaticality.

Other issues with word order

Language change

Languages change over time. When language change involves a shift in a language's syntax, this is called syntactic change. An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution. In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct:
This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage. Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from these examples:
A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise these as grammatically acceptable sentences, but nonetheless archaic; that person would likely change the latter sentence to "are you going into hell?"—they would use the present continuous tense instead of the simple present. There are some verbs, however, that are acceptable in this format:
This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic. This is due to the verb "to be", which acts as both auxiliary and main verb. Similarly, other auxiliary and modal verbs allow for VSO word order. Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage. Shakespeare's usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before.
This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic, the language of the Christian Church in Egypt.

Dialectal Variation

There are some languages where certain word order is preferred by one or more dialects, while others use a different order. One such case is Andean Spanish, spoken in Peru. While Spanish is classified as an SVO language, the variation of Spanish spoken in Peru has been influenced by contact with Quechua and Aymara, both SOV languages. This has had the effect of introducing OV word order into the clauses of some L1 Spanish speakers, with more L2 speakers using similar constructions.

Poetry

Poetry and stories can use different word orders to emphasize certain aspects of the sentence. In English, this is called anastrophe. here is an example:
"Kate loves Mark."
"Mark, Kate loves."
Here SVO is changed to OSV to emphasize the object.

Translation

Differences in word order complicate translation and language education – in addition to changing the individual words, the order must also be changed. The area in Linguistics that is concerned with translation and education is language acquisition. The reordering of words can run into problems, however, when transcribing stories. Rhyme scheme can change, as well as the meaning behind the words. This can be especially problematic when translating poetry.