Word order changes meaning sentences

Inversion

Inversion
is a syntactic phenomenon of the deliberate changing of word order in
the initial sentence model. Word order is a crucial syntactical
problem in many languages. In English it has peculiarities which have
been caused by the concrete and specific way the language has
developed. The English language has developed a fixed word order
which in the great majority of cases shows without fails what is the
Subject of the sentence. This fixed word order is Subject— Verb
(Predicate) — Object (S—P—O).

This
predominance of fixed word order makes conspicuous any change in the
structure of the sentence and inevitably calls forth a modification
in the stylistic meanings.

There
are two types of inversion: grammatical and stylistic. Grammatical
inversion is aimed at the change of the communicative type of
sentence and has no stylistic value.

Stylistic
inversion is aimed at logical or emotional intensification of a
certain sentence element. It attaches the additional emotional
colouring to the surface meaning of the utterance. It is always
semantically and stylistically motivated:

Talent
Mr. Micawber has; capital Mr. Micawber has not (Ch. Dickens).

Rude
am I in my speech… ( W.Shakespeare).

Of
his own class he saw nothing (J. London).

Безбожний
царю, творче зла,

Правди
гонителю жестокий (Т. Шевченко).

Detachment

A
specific arrangement of sentence members is observed in detachment.
Detachment
(відокремлення)
is a stylistic device based on singling out structurally and
semantically a secondary member of the sentence with the help of
punctuation: dashes, commas or even a full stop. When placed in a
certain syntactic position, a detached sentence component may seem
formally independent of the words it refers to, though the word order
may not be violated and semantic connections between the elements
remain strong:

He
had been nearly killed, ingloriously, in a jeep accident (I. Show).

I
have to beg you for money. Daily (S. Lewis).

There
was a world of anticipation in her voice and of confidence too, as
she walked past me on to the terrace (D. du Maurier).

Горіли
свічки, сяяли в рушниках ікони…Але це
відійшло, розтануло разом з ладанними
димами, зостався…лише цей довершений
архітектурний витвір, оця симфонія
пластики (О. Гончар).

Due
to the detachment the adverbial modifiers ingloriously
and daily
and attributive construction
of
confidence in
the English examples and the subject оця
симфонія пластики
in the Ukrainian one have
become foregrounded into the reader’s focus of attention.

Stylistic
function of detachment is determined by the syntactic role of the
isolated element, its place in the sentence, general linguistic and
stylistic context of the utterance.

Detachment
is aimed at foregrounding of the isolated sentence element which
according to author’s standpoint acquires greater emotional or
logical importance. Detachment is used in descriptive and narrative
discourses in order to make a written text akin to the spoken one,
live and emotionally charged. Detachment is one of the most powerful
means of rendering speaker’s emotions or mirroring character’s
emotional /psychological state. It is used in descriptions of nature,
events, situations in order to impress the reader and to create the
presence effect:

Володькові
очі все ширшають і ширшають, на щоках
з’явились
рум’янці.
Щось дуже сильне тягне його туди. Так
хотілося б, так дуже хотілося б… Бачити.
Чути. Знати (У. Самчук).

Марта
ревнувала Антона. Уперто, затаєнно,
сильно, до всіх і до всього (М. Коцюбинський).

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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

Get an expert to perfect your paper

By John McWhorter, Ph.D., Columbia University

Language goes through a lot of changes over time. While some changes such as sound changes and meaning changes are present in every language and take place temporally, there is also the concept of word order which is different from language to language. 

Word order is a concept that is so common that we use it, or its applications on a daily basis, without even realizing its importance. There are different types of word order, out of which English follows the SVO order.

The SVO Word Order

There are a lot of languages in the world, more than 6,000 known ones, and each language has its own idiosyncrasies. Word order is one of the broader characteristics which defines the very usage of a language. There are many, many languages in the world, including English, which use the SVO word order. SVO means subject – verb – object. 

It is highly likely that most people have been exposed to the subject predicate paradigm during the foundational periods of their education. While the concept of the subject part of word order is clearly ingrained in our heads, the other two parts of the word order also fall under this paradigm. Linguists talk about predicates, but more so, about the two elements of the predicate, which is a verb and an object. Together, these three elements form the SVO word order, which seems the most logical to English speakers. This order starts the sentence with the subject, mentions what it did, followed by to whom it did whatever it was doing. This ends up with us forming sentences as: The boy kicked the ball. Here, the boy is the subject, doing the action of kicking, to the ball. While this seems like the most natural way of speaking to English speakers, the truth is that SVO is not, in fact, the most common word order in the world. It is more likely that you will find an SOV language, where the order is subject – object – verb. 

For instance, German seems ‘quaint’ to English speakers, with the tendency of the verb to come at the end of the sentence, The boy has his first alcoholic drink had. In reality, this order is not ‘quaint’ at all, it is completely normal. Many languages follow this structure. Another such example is Turkish. In Turkish, if Hasan bought an ox, then Hasan the ox bought (Hasan öküzü aldi).

For a Turk who has never been exposed to English, perhaps the weirdest thing about the language would be the act of putting the verb in the middle of the sentence. This stands true for a lot of languages across the world.

Learn More about the story of English.

Different Combinations of Word Order

For a linguist studying an undocumented language, it would not be surprising to come across the SOV as much as it being SVO, if not more. In fact, SVO would tend to be the boring kind of word order, and having different word orders would be more interesting.

There are, for instance, languages where the verb comes first. Welsh and its close Celtic relatives, such as Irish Gaelic, Scotch Gaelic, and Breton, are verb first languages. They are VSO: verb – subject – object. That’s also true of languages of Polynesia, like Samoan and Tongan. In these languages, it is quite ordinary for the verb to come first. 

Using just S, V, and O, there are six possible combinations. One of the combinations, OVS, which is, object – verb – subject, was thought to be so wacky, that it would never be found. While it still seemed understandable to put the verb first, this object first combination seemed highly unlikely. Funnily though, it was discovered that there is a language in South America, and it is not the only one, where object – verb – subject is the default word order. 

One of these languages, for instance, is called Hixkaryana, and is spoken by a very small group of people, a sentence such as the man took the canoe  in this language would be canoe took person, or Kanawa yana toto. In this language, this is the normal way to speak. Such is the proliferation of language in our lives that if a Hixkaryana-speaking monolingual person was brought to our civilization, one of the first things they would have to learn is that people here speak ‘backwards’.

This is a transcript from the video series The Story of Human Language. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Changes in Word Order Over Time

Similar to other elements of language, word order has changed significantly over time. While there is a lot of debate about whether SVO was the first word order or SOV, both possibilities are quite plausible. Regardless of the first word order, it has, over the years, given way to a great number of languages which have different word orders. 

In Old English, for instance, the word order system was very similar to the way it is currently in German. In fact, Old English was much more similar to German than it is today. So much so, that Biblical Hebrew, and Modern Hebrew are practically two different languages. Interestingly, one of the key differences between the two was the fact that Biblical Hebrew put the verb before the subject, whereas Modern Hebrew is SVO, much like Modern English. Here too, word order has changed over time. 

Learn More about language mixture.

The Process of Word Order Change

Linguists often claim that a language can start with any word order; it will likely change over time. The switch from SOV to SVO is quite common. In fact, it is quite frequent for a language which puts its verbs at the end to end up putting the verbs in the middle.

Looking at the change from an ethnocentric perspective is what makes us perceive a language’s evolution from SOV to what we are used to as completely normal. Some analyses even suggest that SVO has normalistic tendencies, and everything else is simply a deviation from the normal that may happen over time, and then too, not remain stable. Perhaps this view is strengthened by the fact that seeing a language go from SVO to SOV, a language starting to put its verbs on the end, is very, very rare, with the even rarer exception being situations where people speaking an SVO language start speaking an SOV language to the point that the SOV language starts to affect the original one. Therefore, it is mostly outside influence that creates the possibility of languages becoming SOV from SVO. 

Word Order is such a complex phenomenon, that some languages do not follow a set word order at all. One such language is the Warlpiri, from Australia. In Warlpiri, there is no fixed word order at all. The elements of word order, that is, subject, object, and verb, can appear in any order that the speaker desires. 

This idiosyncrasy is simply the way the language is spoken, it is not a personality trait of the Warlpiri speakers. Their language has, in fact, evolved to include suffixes that indicate whether something is an object or subject. 

The different types of word order and their evolution over time are clear indications of the greater process of language change. The fact that people around the world continue to make language their own, despite it starting from very few, maybe even one language, shows how important language is as a part of human culture. 

Learn More about how language changes.

Commonly Asked Questions about Word Order Changes:

Keep Reading
Wily Words: How Languages Mix on the Level of Words
What’s Wrong With This Sentence? — A Linguist’s View On Grammar Usage
Wonderful Words: How to Describe Liars and the Lies They Tell

You’re about to find out the 2 typical mistakes that English learners make with word order. Click here for 3 more classic mistakes that learners make.

One of the most common mistakes I hear from my students and friends is getting the word order wrong in English.

Why is this important?

Word order is really, really important in English and sometimes can change the whole meaning of a sentence.

Here are the two most common word order mistakes I hear.

Are you making these mistakes, too?

If so, I’m going to show you how to fix them, and you can thank me. With magic cakes, please.

Word Order in English Mistake #1

A long, long time ago, I wrote a short post about how you can fix some of your most common English problems with one simple trick.

How?

Basically, we can look at sentences in colours.

So for example, you can divide the sentence “That rabbit attacks people” into three parts:

The red part is the verb and the blue parts … aren’t.

With this “blue-red-blue,” we can make a basic sentence.

But sometimes we want to add “extra information” to a sentence.

So instead of saying:

I met Charles Dickens.

You might want to add:

I met Charles Dickens in my dream last night.

The extra information (“in my dream last night”) isn’t grammatically necessary, but it might stop people from thinking you’re a bit mad.

In a lot of languages, we can just put the extra information anywhere we like.

But unfortunately, English just isn’t that free.

Usually, the most natural place to add extra information is at the end of a sentence:

And sometimes at the beginning of the sentence:

Just don’t add it here:

That’s it — just remember “blue-red-blue-black.”

Word Order in English Mistake #2

I hear this one a lot.

Especially from cat people.

To solve this, we need to go back to “blue-red-blue” (and sometimes black) thinking.

So, remember I told you that most sentences are “blue-red-blue”:

And that if we want to add extra information, it usually goes at the end:

Or at the beginning:

Well, we also have another type of extra information, which can break the “blue-red-blue” rule.

I call them “VIP adverbs” — that’s because they’re the only words that can go in the middle of “blue-red-blue.”

But what are they?

VIP adverbs are usually one-word adverbs.

They include frequency adverbs:
Sometimes, usually, never, often, seldom, etc.

They include adverbs that come from adjectives:
Quickly, deftly, sexily, etc.

They can also include time adverbs:
Suddenly, eventually, immediately, etc.

And some other types of adverbs:
Only, just, also, really, etc.

There are a few one-word adverbs that aren’t VIP adverbs. Common ones include:
Here, there, today, tomorrow, outside and maybe.
These ones usually go at the end of the sentence.

But where do VIP adverbs go exactly?

In most languages they go here:

But not in English, of course.

Because English likes to be “different” and uncooperative. Or at least it seems like that, right?

In English, they go right in the middle:

Let’s look at some examples.

With two-part verbs

The VIP adverb goes right in the middle:

So that’s why we say:

“I will always love you.” (Like in that song.)
“He’ll never know… He’ll never know! Ha ha ha ha!” (Like in this excellent episode of Black Books.)
“I’ve always been crazy.”

With one-part verbs

It gets a little tricky when we look at one-part verbs:

Where’s the auxiliary? It’s not there!

Actually, it is there. It’s just invisible:

Confused? Let’s take a step back. Click here for a quick overview of auxiliaries.

So where does the VIP adverb go?

You guessed it! Right in the middle.

With non-action verbs

What do I mean by “non-action” verbs?

Here are a few examples:

I’m very happy with your massive hat.

He was a pig, but he’s much better now.

We’re here. Where are you?

All of these sentences use the verb “be” (am, is, are, was, were) without another verb. Notice that there’s no real “action” in the sentences.

I kind of consider “be” more of a “half verb” (when it’s used this way). It doesn’t really do anything, right?

And it’s all by itself in the red there. Without any friends:

As you can see, when there’s no other verb, “be” is in the first of the two red parts.

So where does the VIP adverb go?

The same place as always — right in the middle of the “blue-red-blue.”

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So there we are — two classic mistakes that, in a way, come from the same problem.

How much do you remember? Let’s see. Can you fix these sentences?

1. I don’t know very well Manchester.
2. We went today to the big castle.
3. He was last year a doctor. Now he makes millions playing Sudoku.
4. We have also a lot of cats.
5. You never are here.
6. Your beautiful horse made suddenly a loud noise. It sounded weird.
7. Living here also will get boring.
8. Have you been ever to my father’s ice rink? You should — it’s awesome!

Answer in the comments!

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