Functions of word order in english

The
words in an English sentence are arranged in a certain order which is
fixed for every type of sentence and is, therefore, meaningful. There
exist two ways of arranging words—direct order and inverted order.

Word
order fulfils various functions. The two main functions of word order
are grammatical and communicative. The essence of the grammatical
principle lies in the fact that the sentence position of an element
is determined by its syntactic function. The
communicative
principle manifests itself in that the sentence position of an
element varies depending on its communicative value.

Direct
word Order

The
most common pattern for the arrangement of the main parts in a
declarative sentence is Subject-Predicate-(Object), which is called
direct word order.

I
promise to respect your wishes.

Direct
word order is also employed in pronominal questions to the subject or
its attribute.

Who
told you where I was?

Direct
word order allows of a few variations in the fixed pattern, but only
for the secondary parts.

End—Focus
and End-Weight

Inappropriate
word order may lead to incoherence, clumsy style and lack of clarity.
So when you are deciding in which order to place the ideas in a
sentence, there are two useful guiding principles to remember:

• End-focus:
  the new or most important idea in a piece of information should be
  placed towards the end, where in speech nuclear stress normally
  falls. A sentence is generally more effective (especially in
  writing) if the main point is saved up to the end.

Babies
prefer sleeping on their back.

• End-weight:
  the more “weighty” part(s) of a sentence should be placed
  towards the end. Otherwise the sentence may sound awkward and
  unbalanced. The “weight” of an element can be defined in terms
  of length(e.g. number of syllables) or in terms of grammatical
  complexity (number of modifiers). Structures with introductory it
  and there, for instance, allow to avoid having a long subject, and
  to put what you are taking about in a more prominent position at the
  end of the sentence.

It
becomes hard for a child to develop a sense of identity. There is
grief in his face and reproach at the injustice of it all.

Connected
with the principle of end-weight in English is the feeling that the
predicate of a sentence should be longer or grammatically more
complex than the subject. This helps to explain why English native
speakers tend to avoid predicates consisting of just a single
intransitive verb. Instead of saying Mary sang , they would probably
prefer to say Mary sang a song , filling the object position with a
noun phrase which adds little information but helps to give more
weight to the predicate.

For
such a purpose English often uses a general verb( such as have, take,
give and do ) followed by an abstract noun phrase:

He
is having a swim.—-He is swimming.

He
took a rest.——He rested.

He
does little work.—-He works little.

The
sentences on the left are more idiomatic than on the right and they
contribute to the impression of fluency in English given by a foreign
user.

Order
and Emphasis

English
grammar has quite a number of sentence processes which help to
arrange the message for the right order and the right emphasis.
Because of the principle of end-focus and end- weight, the final
position in a sentence or clause is, in neutral circumstances, the
most important.

But
the first position is also important for communication, because it is
the starting point for what the speaker wants to say: it is (so to
speak) the part of the sentence which is familiar territory in which
the hearer gets his bearings. Therefore the first element in a
sentence or clause is called the TOPIC (or THEME). In most
statements, the topic is the subject of the sentence.

Instead
of the subject, you may make another element the topic by moving it
to the front of the sentence( fronted topic). This shift, which is
called fronting, gives the element a kind of psychological
prominence, and has three different effects:

1. In
   informal conversation it is quite common for a speaker to front an
   element(particularly a complement) and give it nuclear stress:

An
utter fool I felt, too. (topic-complement).

Excellent
food the serve here. (topic-object).

1. Fronting
   also helps to point dramatically to a contrast between two things
   mentioned in the neighbouring sentences or clauses, which often have
   parallel structure:

Rich
I may be, but that doesn’t mean I am happy. (topic-complement).

His
face I am not fond of, but his character I despise.(topic-object)

Willingly
he’ll never do it, he’ll have to be forced. (topic-adverbial of
manner)

1. The
   word this or these is often present in the fronted topic, showing
   that it contains given information. This type of fronting is found
   in more formal, especially written English and serves the function
   of linking the sentence to the previous text.

This
subject we have examined in an earlier chapter, and need not
reconsider (topic-object)

Besides
fronting there are other ways of giving prominence to this or that
part of the sentence.

*cleft
sentences (it-type)

The
cleft sentence construction with emphatic it is useful for putting
focus (usually for contrast)on a particular part of a sentence
expressed by a noun (group) ,a prepositional phrase, and an adverb of
time or place, or even by a clause.

It
was from France that she first heard the news.

Perhaps
it’s because he’s a misfit that I get along with him.

*cleft
sentences(wh-type)

What
he’s done is –spoil the whole thing.

—to
spoil the whole thing.

—spoilt
the whole thing.

Wh-clefts
can also be used to highlight a subject complement. Instead of Jean
and Bob are stingy, we can say: What Jean and Bob are is stingy! This
pattern is used when we want to express our opinion of something or
somebody.

What
we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not
knowledge in pursuit of the child. (G.B.Shaw)

*Wh-clauses
with demonstratives

It
is a common type of sentence in English which is similar to wh-cleft
sentences.

This
is how you start the engine.

*Auxiliary
DO

You
can emphasize a statement by putting do, does , or did in front of
the base form of the verb.

I
do feel sorry for Roger.

But
it goes move.(G.Galilei).

*The
passive

Passive
constructions vary the way information is given in a sentence. The
passive can be used:

—for
end-focus

Who
makes these chairs?—They’re made by Ercol.

—for
end-weight where the subject is a clause

I
was astonished that he was prepared to give me a job. (Better than:
That he was prepared to give me a job astonished me.)

—for
emphasis on what comes first

All
roads to the north have been blocked by snow.

The
other common pattern of word order is the inversion. There are 2
types of inversion:

• Subject-verb
  inversion

Brightly
shone the moon that night…

• Subject-operator/
  auxiliary inversion

Seldom
can there have been such a happy meeting.

Sometimes
the inversion may be taken as a normal order of words in
constructions with special communicative value, and is devoid of any
special colouring.

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Word order is very important in English, because the language is no longer inflected. That is, individual words do not have endings to show which parts of speech they represent. Nevertheless this word order is not invariable. It is well-known that English is a language that strictly follows the syntax rules, in spite of this, exceptions do frequently occur.
Although English exhibits a relatively fixed word order in comparison to many other languages, the English word order is not as rigid as it is held: in many cases, speakers can choose between different constituent orderings or constructional alternations as exemplified in the following sentence pairs: John gave the book to Fred vs. John gave Fred the book, Which newspapers do we maintain strict editorial control over? vs. Over which newspapers do we maintain strict editorial control?, John picked up the book vs. John picked the book up, the President’s speech vs. the speech of the President.
So as it was already mentioned English stylistics allows a sort of flexibility in arranging words in a sentence, as a rule it is mostly common for literary works, both prose and poetry. The reason for this is that changes to conventional syntax are often used to create dramatic, poetic, or comic effect.
For instance, poets and song lyricists often change syntactic order to create rhythmic effects:
E.g. «I’ll sing to him, each spring to him
And long for the day when I’ll cling to him,
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.»
According to Keenan ’s opinion the word order is prominent for its semantic and pragmatic roles. A standard view of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics would be something like the following: Semantics is primarily concerned with meanings that are relatively stable out of context, and analyzable in terms of the logical conditions under which they would be true. Pragmatics, by contrast is related both to the message’s indirect meaning beyond what is written, and to the reader’s interpretation, deriving from the context.
Finally, semantic roles are simpler than pragmatic ones. Semantic relations represent consistent common recognition of the objective world by the whole language community, while pragmatic role involves individual writers’ subjective, contingent knowledge, assumption, attitude, etc. Semantic relations can be seen as the essential, notional part of word order units, whereas pragmatic roles are not part of units, they are the packaging or the way of using units.
The semantically optimal order is homogeneous from the general point of view; while the criteria for ‘basic order’ are diverse in the literature. The reason for this is the fact that literature is a noble art that changes neck-to-neck with its basic instrument – the language which is constantly developing. The literary style has a tendency to be diversified; the writers’ aim is to achieve some elevated effect on the reader that is why they do not follow strict syntax rules. In this manner they make their works unique, vivid and outstanding.
Generally speaking, the role of word order is to transmit the message so as it could be easily perceived by the reader.
What concerns the word order in different writing styles, its primary role is to emphasize some particular message carried by the sentence and to produce a colorful and deep effect on the reader.

In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines 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

• the constituent order of a clause, namely the relative order of subject, object, and verb;
• the order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun phrase;
• the order of adverbials.

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,^[1] with other word orders considered «marked».^[2]

Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O).^[3][4][5][6] Subject and object are here understood to be nouns, since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties.^[7][8] Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders:

• about half of the world’s languages deploy subject–object–verb order (SOV);
• about one-third of the world’s languages deploy subject–verb–object order (SVO);
• a smaller fraction of languages deploy verb–subject–object (VSO) order;
• the remaining three arrangements are rarer: verb–object–subject (VOS) is slightly more common than object–verb–subject (OVS), and object–subject–verb (OSV) is the rarest by a significant margin.^[9]

Constituent word orders[edit]

These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use «she» as the subject, «loves» as the verb, and «him» as the object):

• SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish, the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages. Some, like Persian, Latin and Quechua, have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages. A sentence glossing as «She him loves» would be grammatically correct in these languages.
• SVO languages include English, Spanish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian,^[10] the Chinese languages and Swahili, among others. «She loves him.»
• VSO languages include Classical Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, the Insular Celtic languages, and Hawaiian. «Loves she him.»
• VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy. «Loves him she.»
• OVS languages include Hixkaryana. «Him loves she.»
• OSV languages include Xavante and Warao. «Him she loves.»

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, Assamese, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, Arabic and Basque have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. However, also in languages of this kind there is usually a pragmatically neutral constituent order that is most commonly encountered in each language.

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.^{[citation needed]} 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. («O» for object may be replaced with «P» for «patient» as well.) 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[edit]

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^[11] surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study^[8] investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies.

Word Order	Number (2005)	Percentage (2005)	Number (2013)	Percentage (2013)
SOV	497	40.5%	565	41.0%
SVO	435	35.4%	488	35.4%
VSO	85	6.9%	95	6.9%
VOS	26	2.1%	25	1.8%
OVS	9	0.7%	11	0.8%
OSV	4	0.3%	4	0.3%
Unfixed	172	14.0%	189	13.7%

Hammarström (2016)^[12] 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 Order	No. of Languages	Percentage	No. of Families	Percentage[a]
SOV	2275	43.3%	239	56.6%
SVO	2117	40.3%	55	13.0%
VSO	503	9.5%	27	6.3%
VOS	174	3.3%	15	3.5%
OVS	40	0.7%	3	0.7%
OSV	19	0.3%	1	0.2%
Unfixed	124	2.3%	26	6.1%

Functions of constituent word order[edit]

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 (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) 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.^[1]

Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). 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.^[13]

Semantics of word order[edit]

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.^[14] 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?’ [Whom does Kate love? / Kate loves whom?] (OVS/SVO)

B: ‘Sie liebt Mark’ / ‘Mark ist der, den sie liebt’ [She loves Mark / It is Mark whom she loves.] (SVO/OSV)

C: ‘Liebt Kate Mark?’ [Does Kate love Mark?] (VSO)

In (A), 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 [whom] (which indicates that this sentence is a question) with an identifier such as Mark: ‘Kate liebt Mark?’ [Kate loves 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 (B), the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in (A). The second sentence emphasizes 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 (or even in written language), be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer the echo question in (A) simply by restating: Mark!. This is the same for both languages.

In yes–no questions such as (C), 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.

Despite this, 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 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 (verb-first) 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(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb^{[clarification needed]}).

Phrase word orders and branching[edit]

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 and/or after the head noun.

• adjective (red house vs house red)
• determiner (this house vs house this)
• numeral (two houses vs houses two)
• possessor (my house vs house my)
• relative clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)

Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately (For whom? or Whom for?) or at the same time (from her away; Dutch example: met hem mee meaning together with him).

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 (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as extraordinaire, which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов=six houses, домов шесть=circa six houses).

Pragmatic word order[edit]

Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However, the degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order: some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking, while others (such as some varieties of Datooga) may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments.

Typologically, there is a trend that high-animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low-animacy undergoers; this trend can come through even in languages with free word order, giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS order in ergative systems; however, ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy, sometimes giving way to an accusative system (see split ergativity)).^[15]

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 this is much harder in others.^[16] When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the rheme.

Hungarian[edit]

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 (rheme) from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information (theme).

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.» (same word order as English) [«Kate ate a piece of cake.«]
2. «Egy szelet tortát Kati evett meg.» (emphasis on agent [Kate]) [«A piece of cake Kate ate.«] (One of the pieces of cake was eaten by Kate.)
3. «Kati evett meg egy szelet tortát.» (also emphasis on agent [Kate]) [«Kate ate a piece of cake.«] (Kate was the one eating one piece of cake.)
4. «Kati egy szelet tortát evett meg.» (emphasis on object [cake]) [«Kate a piece of cake ate.»] (Kate ate a piece of cake – cf. not a piece of bread.)
5. «Egy szelet tortát evett meg Kati.» (emphasis on number [a piece, i.e. only one piece]) [«A piece of cake ate Kate.»] (Only one piece of cake was eaten by Kate.)
6. «Megevett egy szelet tortát Kati.» (emphasis on completeness of action) [«Ate a piece of cake Kate.»] (A piece of cake had been finished by Kate.)
7. «Megevett Kati egy szelet tortát.» (emphasis on completeness of action) [«Ate Kate a piece of cake.«] (Kate finished with a piece of cake.)

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 (verb) itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action (verb), as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb (in the above example ‘meg’), 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’ (cake) + ‘-t’ -> ‘tortát’.

Hindi-Urdu[edit]

Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions mark quite explicitly the relationships of noun phrases with other constituents of the sentence.^[17] Word order in Hindustani usually does not signal grammatical functions.^[18] Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in a sentence is usually the topic,^[19][18] which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle «to» (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は (wa).^{[20][21][22][23]} Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows:

• An adjective comes before the noun it modifies in its unmarked position. However, the possessive and reflexive pronominal adjectives can occur either to the left or to the right of the noun it describes.
• Negation must come either to the left or to the right of the verb it negates. For compound verbs or verbal construction using auxiliaries the negation can occur either to the left of the first verb, in-between the verbs or to the right of the second verb (the default position being to the left of the main verb when used with auxiliary and in-between the primary and the secondary verb when forming a compound verb).
• Adverbs usually precede the adjectives they qualify in their unmarked position, but when adverbs are constructed using the instrumental case postposition se (से /سے) (which qualifies verbs), their position in the sentence becomes free. However, since both the instrumental and the ablative case are marked by the same postposition «se» (से /سے), when both are present in a sentence then the quantity they modify cannot appear adjacent to each other^{[clarification needed]}.^[24][18]
• «kyā » (क्या / کیا) «what» as the yes-no question marker occurs at the beginning or the end of a clause as its unmarked positions but it can be put anywhere in the sentence except the preverbal position, where instead it is interpreted as interrogative «what».

Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence «The girl received a gift from the boy on her birthday.» are shown below.

lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe taufā milā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā milā janmdin pe lar̥ki ko milā lar̥ke se taufā taufā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko janmdin pe milā milā janmdin pe lar̥ki ko taufā lar̥ke se

lar̥ki ko taufā lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe milā janmdin pe lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko milā taufā lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā lar̥ki ko milā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā lar̥ke se

taufā lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā taufā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko milā janmdin pe janmdin pe milā lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe milā taufā lar̥ki ko milā taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe lar̥ke se

lar̥ke se milā lar̥ki ko taufā janmdin pe lar̥ke se milā taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā lar̥ke se milā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā milā lar̥ke se janmdin pe lar̥ki ko milā lar̥ki ko lar̥ke se janmdin pe taufā

lar̥ke se taufā lar̥ki ko janmdin pe milā lar̥ke se janmdin pe lar̥ki ko milā taufā taufā janmdin pe lar̥ke se milā lar̥ki ko lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā milā lar̥ke se milā lar̥ke se lar̥ki ko janmdin pe taufā

Portuguese[edit]

In Portuguese, clitic pronouns and commas allow many different orders:^{[citation needed]}

• «Eu vou entregar a você amanhã.» [«I will deliver to you tomorrow.»] (same word order as English)
• «Entregarei a você amanhã.» [«{I} will deliver to you tomorrow.»]
• «Eu lhe entregarei amanhã.» [«I to you will deliver tomorrow.»]
• «Entregar-lhe-ei amanhã.» [«Deliver to you {I} will tomorrow.»] (mesoclisis)
• «A ti, eu entregarei amanhã.» [«To you I will deliver tomorrow.»]
• «A ti, entregarei amanhã.» [«To you deliver {I} will tomorrow.»]
• «Amanhã, entregar-te-ei» [«Tomorrow {I} will deliver to you»]
• «Poderia entregar, eu, a você amanhã?» [«Could deliver I to you tomorrow?]

Braces ({ }) are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns, which may be implicit in Portuguese. Because of conjugation, the grammatical person is recovered.

Latin[edit]

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 (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last.^[25] Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question:^[26]

• «Romulus Romam condidit.» [«Romulus founded Rome»] (What did Romulus do?)
• «Hanc urbem condidit Romulus.» [«Romulus founded this city»] (Who founded this city?)
• «Condidit Romam Romulus.» [«Romulus founded Rome»] (What happened?)

Latin prose often follows the word order «Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb»,^[27] but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify,^[28] but some categories, such as those that determine or specify (e.g. Via Appia «Appian Way»), usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion.

Albanian[edit]

Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) 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:

• «Marku më dha një dhuratë (mua).» [«Mark (me) gave a present to me.»] (neutral narrating sentence.)
• «Marku (mua) më dha një dhuratë.» [«Mark to me (me) gave a present.»] (emphasis on the indirect object, probably to compare the result of the verb on different persons.)
• «Marku një dhuratë më dha (mua).» [«Mark a present (me) gave to me»] (meaning that Mark gave her only a present, and not something else or more presents.)
• «Marku një dhuratë (mua) më dha.» [«Mark a present to me (me) gave»] (meaning that Mark gave a present only to her.)
• «Më dha Marku një dhuratë (mua).» [«Gave Mark to me a present.»] (neutral sentence, but puts less emphasis on the subject.)
• «Më dha një dhuratë Marku (mua).» [«Gave a present to me Mark.»] (probably is the cause of an event being introduced later.)
• «Më dha (mua) Marku një dhurate.» [«Gave to me Mark a present.»] (same as above.)
• «Më dha një dhuratë mua Marku» [«(Me) gave a present to me Mark.»] (puts emphasis on the fact that the receiver is her and not someone else.)
• «Një dhuratë më dha Marku (mua)» [«A present gave Mark to me.»] (meaning it was a present and not something else.)
• «Një dhuratë Marku më dha (mua)» [«A present Mark gave to me.»] (puts emphasis on the fact that she got the present and someone else got something different.)
• «Një dhuratë (mua) më dha Marku.» [«A present to me gave Mark.»] (no particular emphasis, but can be used to list different actions from different subjects.)
• «Një dhuratë (mua) Marku më dha.» [«A present to me Mark (me) gave»] (remembers that at least a present was given to her by Mark.)
• «Mua më dha Marku një dhuratë.» [«To me (me) gave Mark a present.» (is used when Mark gave something else to others.)
• «Mua një dhuratë më dha Marku.» [«To me a present (me) gave Mark.»] (emphasis on «to me» and the fact that it was a present, only one present or it was something different from usual.)
• «Mua Marku një dhuratë më dha» [«To me Mark a present (me) gave.»] (Mark gave her only one present.)
• «Mua Marku më dha një dhuratë» [«To me Mark (me) gave a present.»] (puts emphasis on Mark. Probably the others didn’t give her present, they gave something else or the present wasn’t expected at all.)

In these examples, «(mua)» 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 (a direct and an indirect one), 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)[edit]

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:^[14]

• «Wakial ‘o g wipsilo ha-cecposid.» [Cowboy is the calves them branding.] (The cowboy is branding the calves.)
• «Wipsilo ‘o ha-cecposid g wakial.» [Calves is them branding the cowboy.]
• «Ha-cecposid ‘o g wakial g wipsilo.» [Them Branding is the cowboy the calves.]
• «Wipsilo ‘o g wakial ha-cecposid.» [Calves is the cowboy them branding.]
• «Ha-cecposid ‘o g wipsilo g wakial.» [Them branding is the calves the cowboy.]
• «Wakial ‘o ha-cecposid g wipsilo.» [Cowboy is them branding the calves.]

These examples are all grammatically-valid variations on the sentence «The cowboy is branding the calves,» but some are rarely found in natural speech, as is discussed in Grammaticality.

Other issues with word order[edit]

Language change[edit]

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.^[29] In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct:

• «Martianus hæfde his sunu ær befæst.» [Martianus had his son earlier established.] (Martianus had earlier established his son.)
• «Se wolde gelytlian þone lyfigendan hælend.» [He would diminish the living saviour.]

This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage.^[30] Shakespeare’s plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example:

• «It was our selfe thou didst abuse.»^[31]

A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic. There are some verbs, however, that are entirely acceptable in this format:

• «Are they good?»^[32]

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 («Must he perish?»). Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage («Did he buy the book?»). Shakespeare’s usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before.^[33]

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.^[34]

Dialectal variation[edit]

There are some languages where a 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,^[35] the variation of Spanish spoken in Peru has been influenced by contact with Quechua and Aymara, both SOV languages.^[36] This has had the effect of introducing OV (object-verb) word order into the clauses of some L1 Spanish speakers (moreso than would usually be expected), with more L2 speakers using similar constructions.

Poetry[edit]

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[edit]

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.

See also[edit]

• Antisymmetry
• Information flow
• Language change

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

Normally, sentences in the English language take a simple form. However, there are times it would be a little complex. In these cases, the basic rules for how words appear in a sentence can help you.

Word order typically refers to the way the words in a sentence are arranged. In the English language, the order of words is important if you wish to accurately and effectively communicate your thoughts and ideas.

Although there are some exceptions to these rules, this article aims to outline some basic sentence structures that can be used as templates. Also, the article provides the rules for the ordering of adverbs and adjectives in English sentences.

Basic Sentence Structure and word order rules in English

For English sentences, the simple rule of thumb is that the subject should always come before the verb followed by the object. This rule is usually referred to as the SVO word order, and then most sentences must conform to this. However, it is essential to know that this rule only applies to sentences that have a subject, verb, and object.

For example

Subject + Verb + Object

He loves food

She killed the rat

Sentences are usually made of at least one clause. A clause is a string of words with a subject(noun) and a predicate (verb). A sentence with just one clause is referred to as a simple sentence, while those with more than one clause are referred to as compound sentences, complex sentences, or compound-complex sentences.

The following is an explanation and example of the most commonly used clause patterns in the English language.

Inversion

The English word order is inverted in questions. The subject changes its place in a question. Also, English questions usually begin with a verb or a helping verb if the verb is complex.

For example

Verb + Subject + object

Can you finish the assignment?

Did you go to work?

Intransitive Verbs

Some sentences use verbs that require no object or nothing else to follow them. These verbs are generally referred to as intransitive verbs. With intransitive verbs, you can form the most basic sentences since all that is required is a subject (made of one noun) and a predicate (made of one verb).

For example

Subject + verb

John eats

Christine fights

Linking Verbs

Linking verbs are verbs that connect a subject to the quality of the subject. Sentences that use linking verbs usually contain a subject, the linking verb and a subject complement or predicate adjective in this order.

For example

Subject + verb + Subject complement/Predicate adjective

The dress was beautiful

Her voice was amazing

Transitive Verbs

Transitive verbs are verbs that tell what the subject did to something else. Sentences that use transitive verbs usually contain a subject, the transitive verb, and a direct object, usually in this order.

For example

Subject + Verb + Direct object

The father slapped his son

The teacher questioned his students

Indirect Objects

Sentences with transitive verbs can have a mixture of direct and indirect objects. Indirect objects are usually the receiver of the action or the audience of the direct object.

For example

Subject + Verb + IndirectObject + DirectObject

He gave the man a good job.

The singer gave the crowd a spectacular concert.

The order of direct and indirect objects can also be reversed. However, for the reversal of the order, there needs to be the inclusion of the preposition “to” before the indirect object. The addition of the preposition transforms the indirect object into what is called a prepositional phrase.

For example

Subject + Verb + DirectObject + Preposition + IndirectObject

He gave a lot of money to the man

The singer gave a spectacular concert to the crowd.

Adverbials

Adverbs are phrases or words that modify or qualify a verb, adjective, or other adverbs. They typically provide information on the when, where, how, and why of an action. Adverbs are usually very difficult to place as they can be in different positions in a sentence. Changing the placement of an adverb in a sentence can change the meaning or emphasis of that sentence.

Therefore, adverbials should be placed as close as possible to the things they modify, generally before the verbs.

For example

He hastily went to work.

He hurriedly ate his food.

However, if the verb is transitive, then the adverb should come after the transitive verb.

For example

John sat uncomfortably in the examination exam.

She spoke quietly in the class

The adverb of place is usually placed before the adverb of time

For example

John goes to work every morning

They arrived at school very late

The adverb of time can also be placed at the beginning of a sentence

For example

On Sunday he is traveling home

Every evening James jogs around the block

When there is more than one verb in the sentence, the adverb should be placed after the first verb.

For example

Peter will never forget his first dog

She has always loved eating rice.

Adjectives

Adjectives commonly refer to words that are used to describe someone or something. Adjectives can appear almost anywhere in the sentence.

Adjectives can sometimes appear after the verb to be

For example

He is fat

She is big

Adjectives can also appear before a noun.

For example

A big house

A fat boy

However, some sentences can contain more than one adjective to describe something or someone. These adjectives have an order in which they can appear before a now. The order is

Opinion – size – physical quality – shape – condition – age – color – pattern – origin – material – type – purpose

If more than one adjective is expected to come before a noun in a sentence, then it should follow this order. This order feels intuitive for native English speakers. However, it can be a little difficult to unpack for non-native English speakers.

For example

The ugly old woman is back

The dirty red car parked outside your house

When more than one adjective comes after a verb, it is usually connected by and

For example

The room is dark and cold

Having said that, Susan is tall and big

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