Word order in english and french

The aim of this research project was to analyse 26 examples of the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) Extended Essay in History according to North’s (2005) categorisation of orienting Themes (textual, interpersonal and experiential) and topical Themes as well as McCabe’s (1999) realisations of thematic progression, in particular the simple linear progression and constant progression structures. Many studies have found correlations between Theme choice, particularly use of circumstantial Themes, and thematic progression, particularly the use of simple linear progression and constant progression, and a writer’s first language, their level of proficiency in English, and also disciplinary variation. Other studies have focused on the pedagogical possibilities surrounding teaching students, especially non-native English learners, how to use Theme in their academic writing. The basic hypothesis of the present study was that the successful use of Theme choice and thematic progression correlates to the subject grades received by IB students. The corpus consists of 26 extracts of 25 t-units (clause complexes) each, all written for the History Extended Essay, which received subject grades ranging from A to E. The texts were sourced from a international secondary school in the South of France, and also from the IB’s publications ’50 Excellent Extended Essays and 50 more Excellent Extended Essays’ (2011). None of the participants had received any kind of instruction regarding how to use different Themes and thematic progression in their texts. Regarding Theme choice, the analyses carried out focused on correlating the use of all orienting Themes, textual Themes, interpersonal Themes and experiential Themes with subject grades. In relation to thematic progression, the analyses undertaken searched for correlations between the use of simple linear progression, constant progression, and the ratio of simple linear progression to constant progression with subject grades. Positive, statistically-significant correlations were identified between the use of all orienting Themes and subject grades, and the use of simple linear progression and subject grades. Where no statistically-significant correlations were first identified, further research uncovered correlations for some sub-categories. For example, although the use of experiential Themes did not correlate with subject grades, the use of long experiential Themes (consisting of 10 words or more) was found to be significant. The occurrence of these long experiential Themes often coincided with the use of the simple linear progression, which in providing local cohesion allowed the writer to use the topical Theme either to present new information without compromising cohesion, or to provide an extra level of cohesion through the use of constant progression. As for the analysis of constant progression itself and subject grades, although no correlation was found, a sub-category which I define as ‘inference constant progression’ did correlate with subject grades. The essence of this sub- category is that it involved Themes linking back to previous Themes not through simple repetition of the same words, or through substitution of a previous Theme with a pronoun, but instead used synonyms, possessive adjectives, semantically-related words, and rephrasing to connect one Theme to a previous one. This allows a writer to expand their use of vocabulary at the same time as creating tight cohesive links through subtle shifts in the focus of the argument between t-units referring to the same subject. Finally, although no correlation was found between the ratio of simple linear progression to constant progression and subject grades (see Soleymanzadeh and Gholami, 2014), some observations about the complex interaction of the use of orienting and topical Themes, together with the use of new Themes, simple linear progression and constant progression were highlighted. The main points to emphasize are that both elements which promote cohesion like simple linear progression and constant progression, and those involved in breaks in cohesion like new Themes, work together in the orienting and topical Theme positions to create complex arrangements in highly-cohesive texts. I therefore argue that analysis of cohesion in academic writing needs to go beyond fixations on correlations of global categories (like simple linear progression or circumstantial Themes and cohesion) and instead look for both sub-categories of these functions as well as interaction patterns between all these elements, whether taken individually they are considered to assist in cohesion or not. Finally, it is hypothesized that further research into the use of cohesion in the Extended Essay could lead to the production of pedagogical materials which could help the tens of thousands of students around the world who must write an Extended Essay as part of their IB qualification each year.

  • #1

Hello, I’m just curious about this and maybe someone here knows, does English get its word order from French? I’m thinking that it must be so, and that it must date to the Norman invasion. Not in all examples, to be sure, but I’ve compared it to German, which is a close proximity in the Anglo-Saxon line, and it’s much closer to French. See how the parts correspond below:

I heard my father walk by the door.

J’ai entendu mon pere marcherdevant la porte.

Subject Predicate Verb Preposition Noun

To be sure there are some instances where the order isn’t identical, but in many it is. If I am wrong, then can someone else shed some light on this for me?

I’m going to the store to buy something.

Je vais au magasin pour acheter quelque chose.

    • #2

    (I’m sorry, I’m going to use some fancy words because it’s shorter. I don’t know to what extent you’re familiar with this kind of terminology but people who are interested in the word order of languages very often have quite an idea about grammatical terminology as well :cool: — Do feel free to ask for explanation if there’s something you don’t quite understand.)

    The word order of English has often been connected to the case syncretism that the language suffered. What used to be marked morphologically by nominative case in Old English (which had V2 or SOV order, like present day German and Dutch), is (standardly) marked in a syntactic way by being to the left of the verb in Present-Day English. The syntactic function of what used to be marked by accusative case in older stages, on the other hand, nowadays can be inferred from the position to the right of the verb.

    Although case syncretism may be a sufficient condition, it isn’t a necessary one. Still, as it has been showed that the earliest uses of SVO order in English are favoured when subject and object are morphologically ambiguous, case syncretism does appear to have been the causal factor for English SVO fixation. (Dutch, which also lost its case system, can offer proof for the evolution to a more fixed word order. Dutch didn’t quite fixate SVO order though, but the language still has more morphology than English, and Dutch is in fact typologically rare in the respect of being a language which has (well, can have) SOV order (in subordinate clauses that is) but no case marking.)

    • #3

    I wouldn’t think so. Much of the rigidity of today’s English sentence structure developed during the modern English period. In early ModE, word orders which resemble much more that of German were fairly common. Sentences like
    To him I will bequeath my fortune.
    I hope this night my true love to see.
    would not have been out of the ordinary.

    In your example

    I’m going to the store to buy something.

    the preposition to in to buy is not related to pour in pour acheter but has a Germanic origin. In Old English, to buy had two infinitives, bycġan and bycġanne the former of which developed into the bare infinitive buy and the later into the full infinitive to buy with the preposition to (which also appeared already in OE but was not mandatory there) compensating for the lost morphological distinction.

    It might also serve as circumstantial evidence for a not too far reaching French influence on English word order that the SOV order in main (not only subordinate!) clauses which is very typical for Latin an has survived in French for pronoun objects (where case distinction is still present) like in Je vais le lui dire has never made it into English.

    • #4

    Hello, I’m just curious about this and maybe someone here knows, does English get its word order from French? I’m thinking that it must be so, and that it must date to the Norman invasion. Not in all examples, to be sure, but I’ve compared it to German, which is a close proximity in the Anglo-Saxon line, and it’s much closer to French. See how the parts correspond below:

    I heard my father walk by the door.

    J’ai entendu mon pere marcherdevant la porte.

    Subject Predicate Verb Preposition Noun

    To be sure there are some instances where the order isn’t identical, but in many it is. If I am wrong, then can someone else shed some light on this for me?

    I’m going to the store to buy something.

    Je vais au magasin pour acheter quelque chose.

    It is even much closer to Danish and various other Germanic languages. Shouldn’t really be a big surprise to anyone.

    Exceptions are sentences where you use «to do» — like in

    «Do you have a knife?»

    In Ireland they often leav that out and say

    «Have you a knife?»

    Even closer to Danish:

    «Har du en kniv?»

    The same question in High German would be:

    «Hast du ein Messer?»
    or formal third person speach: «Haben Sie ein Messer?»

    Still the same word order. Even the second person verb is very similar to OE.

    The same question in French would be a far cry from this.

    Besides you are talking about the Norman invasion — when EXACTLY do you mean? Are you at all sure they spoke French? (And why?). I do not know the historic facts of that area and the possible periods too well, but I know for sure that there are still a good deal of people in that part of France that speak Bretonic — that is a Celtic language, just like Irish.

    Besides, the word order as you describe it

    Subject Predicate Verb Preposition Noun

    does not really convince me, anyway. The reason is simple and logical. Certain characteristics, like the word order preposition-noun are the same in all Indoeuropean languages that I have even the slightest knowledge of. That is probably why somebody called them PREpositions. The same goes for having the subject in front of the verb, when it is not a question. (With the exception of those languages where you can either leave the subject or the verb out).

    With this in mind, you tell me what you have got left to compose a different word order with.

    Last edited: Jun 18, 2008

    natkretep


    • #5

    Sorry for resurrecting this old thread. Has anyone read John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue? He suggests that it was the interaction between the Vikings (Norse speakers) and the English that led to the abandonment of the ‘verb second’ (V2) word order.

    He also suggests that the rise of the use of do support (what he calls the ‘meaningless do‘ — do you want this? you do not want this) arose out of the the Celtic speakers who spoke English as a kind of second language originally.

    • #6

    The loss of V2 as the basic structure of English declarative sentences (contrary to modern German and Dutch, there had always been exceptions in Old and Middle English) happened to late (15th century) to be due to direct Norse influence. It could only be a dialect contact phenomenon where northern, Old Norse-influenced dialectal structures entered the (southern) standard language. While being prima facie plausible the hypothesis completely lacks evidence to support it. A more reasonable explanation seems to me that it is a consequence of the loss of inflections that promotes a more rigid SVO order. Here, it is related to the loss of null expletive subjects which in itself is related to the loss of verb inflections*.

    Do as an auxiliary verb has a long History in Germanic languages. The weak preterite originated from (this can be regarded as consensus opinion today) an enclitic preterite form for do in PGmc, i.e. he loved her originated from the structure he love-did her. In positive statements, the auxiliary do serves as en emphatic form (He does love her!). Though frowned upon in standard language, this is perfectly normal in many regional vernaculars in German as well. The expletive use in English (when do you come? rather than when commest thou?) happened only during the early modern English period; much, much too late to have anything to do with Celtic influence. I haven’t read that McWhorter’s argument; but if it were constructed like all the other Celtic substratum/influence theories and French, English and other languages, its plausibility would mainly be based on the lack of evidence, either pro or con. Many of these theories seem to on the argument Here we have a spurious phenomenon; here we have a spurious explanation; sounds like a perfect match.
    ____________________________________________________
    *In German, expletive subjects are normally dropped to preserve V2 structure: Es ist ihm kalt (Es = expletive subject). With fronting of ihm the sentence becomes: Ihm ist kalt. Similar structures existed in Old and Middle English too and but in late Middle English, the time when the basic paradigm moved from V2 to SVO.

    natkretep


    • #7

    Thanks, berndf.

    Yes, I agree there’s a link between inflection loss and the loosening of the V2 word order, but then the inflection loss itself is often linked to English-Norse pidginisation.

    McWhorter does not provide a lot of detailed evidence but he says that it will be in the language of the speakers of English as a second language which would therefore be automatically filtered out in all writing. He makes the same argument for the apparent sudden appearance of do support much later in time. He refers to DNA evidence that much of the ‘English’ population had Celtic links, indicating that the Celts lived among the Anglo-Saxons as subjugated people and were eventually absorbed into the community, but not before their Celtic-influenced version of English influenced the language in Britain. Their variety lacked prestige and was never represented in OE. He also suggests that linguists have not made the link because most linguists writing on the history of English were not familiar with Celtic languages.

    He also has a kind of theory about why the Germanic branch is different from the other branches of Indo-European — this time, it’s the Phoenicians possibly settling in Europe and therefore adjusting PGmc. But he does say that there is more conjecture here.

    • #8

    Yes, I agree there’s a link between inflection loss and the loosening of the V2 word order, but then the inflection loss itself is often linked to English-Norse pidginisation.

    If it is a pidginization then it is certainly due to the Norman invasion and the mass import of Anglo-French vocabulary and not due to mixture with Norse. The only loss of inflection we observe in the late OE/early ME period is due to phonetic development we observe in other West Germanic languages as well: the reduction of vowels in unstressed endings and subsequent loss vowel distinctions (merger into Schwa).

    He makes the same argument for the apparent sudden appearance of do support much later in time.

    Up to Early

    Modern

    English, the frequency of unmarked (i.e. non-emphatic) auxiliary do is comparable to that in other West Germanic vernaculars and, hence, inconspicuous. I am curious what period he has in mind for this «sudden appearance». Since the corpus of original manuscripts or inscriptions older than the 9th or 10th century is much to small for any meaningful statistics, the most relevant period (the centuries following the Anglo-Saxon conquest) remain completely in the dark.

    Their variety lacked prestige and was never represented in OE.

    This sounds suspiciously like the style of argument I caricatured above: There is no evidence whatsoever, hence you can’t disprove it, hence it must be true.

    Last edited: Jun 25, 2014

    fdb

    Senior Member


    • #9

    Given the fact that there are virtually no Celtic loanwords in English (or shall we say: very, very few) all theories about Celtic influence on English syntax seem highly questionable.

    Last edited: Jun 26, 2014

    natkretep


    • #10

    That is the mainstream view. Some scholars have said that scholars have been ignoring Celtic loan-words in English. Loreto Todd had an article in English Today.I will try to look up McWhorter again later.

    natkretep


    • #11

    The fuller account can be found in his 2007 book, Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars.

    I’ll just mention a few of his points. He mentions the consensus which links the loss of V2 to the erosion of verbal inflectional morphology, and concludes that these explanations lack explanatory power or falsifiability. He also mentions inflection loss in Mainland Scandinavian which did not result in the loss of V2.

    He also mentions the new Celtists, and their work filtering into the mainstream:

    The arguments that Celtic was the source of do-support (Poussa 1990; Tristram 1997; White 2002), the —ing gerund and progressive (Mittendorf and Poppe 2000; White 2002), and the Northern Subject Rule in which third-person plural is only marked when the verb and the pronoun — but not a full NP — are adjacent (yielding They peel and boils them and Birds flies) (Klemola 2000) are likely to gain wider acceptance over time. (p. 89)

    I suppose the ‘sudden appearance’ is not to do with the features not being around, but being to do with the re-emergence of written English after the Norman period, which allowed the tight grip of a standard form in writing to be abandoned.

    On the relative lack of Celtic lexical influence in contrast to the Scandinavians, he says:

    The Scandinavians came to Britain, encountered a new language, and were immediately stuck with floundering about in a version of English that they — big surprise — decorated with words of their own where they could. Celts, original inhabitants who could go on speaking their native languages among themselves as they always had, regardless of the language the new invaders were gradually pressing into their world, got acquainted with the new tongue more gradually. (p. 90)

    • #12

    I find it a bit strange that to label the mainstream hypothesis as lacking explanatory power and falsifiability when the alternative hypothesis he proposes rest completely and exclusively on unattested phenomena. But well, when he says …are likely to gain wider acceptance over time I take this to mean that he is proposing a research programme rather than a developed theory. As such it is interesting but nothing that could shake mainstream opinion as of now. The lack of apparent Celtic influence on English is perplexing phenomenon than certainly warrants more research. But if we want to link late ME V2 erosion to influence by a non-V2 language then French is again a more obvious candidate than Celtic. The exceptions to V2 syntax that existed already in OE could possibly be a more interesting phenomenon, if you wanted to trace possible Celtic influence; maybe, I don’t know.

    The increased use of do-support during the ME period (starting in the 14th century) without apparent emphatic meaning is in itself still inconspicuous. There are German vernaculars where this phenomenon is more wide-spread than in late ME (In Rhinelandish vernacular, e.g., er tut das nicht brauchen instead of er braucht das nicht has all but lost its emphatic significance and is extremely wide-spread). The significant development is the grammaticalization of do-support that happened significantly later, notably after the erosion of V2 syntax.

    natkretep


    • #13

    I think for the loss of V2, he might be thinking of Scandinavian rather than Celtic influence. For him, French influenced the more formal aspects of the language, especially the lexicon, rather than the grammar. There’s apparently research on contact languages where the SVO pattern is considered universal.

    The general thesis is that English stands apart from the other Germanic languages in the extent to which it has shed its Germanic features, much more than Afrikaans, and he’s attempting to answer the question about what makes the situation of English so different from all the other Germanic languages. In the case of do-support, we have a situation where it is a requirement rather than an option in English interrogatives and negatives, and this is not the case in any other Germanic language.

    • #14

    I think for the loss of V2, he might be thinking of Scandinavian rather than Celtic influence.

    I am a bit confused. Scandinavian languages did not lose V2 syntax. A fact that you noted yourself:

    He also mentions inflection loss in Mainland Scandinavian which did not result in the loss of V2.

    • #15

    In the case of do-support, we have a situation where it is a requirement rather than an option in English interrogatives and negatives, and this is not the case in any other Germanic language.

    This is indeed the crucial point which I mentioned before:

    The significant development is the grammaticalization of do-support that happened significantly later, notably after the erosion of V2 syntax.

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      A2 — Low-Intermediate French • word order 

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    Placement for Dual-Verb Sentences, Pronouns, and Negatives

    The well-educated French have no problem acing sentence structure.
    ONOKY — Fabrice LEROUGE/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

    The order of words in a French sentence can be confusing, especially if you have, as we do, dual-verb constructions, object and adverbial pronouns, and negative structures. Here, we’re going to take a look at all of these and suggest the best positioning of words so that you don’t end up with French sentences that make no sense.

    Dual-Verb Constructions

    Dual-verb constructions consist of a conjugated semi-auxiliary verb, such as pouvoir and devoir (called modal verbs in English), vouloirallerespérer, and promettre, followed by a second verb in the infinitive. The two verbs may or may not be joined by a preposition. 

    Dual-verb constructions have a slightly different word order than compound verbs tenses. Word order is important because, if you get it wrong, the sentence will read like nonsense in French.

    Object and Reflexive Pronouns

    Object and reflexive pronouns are usually placed between the two verbs and after the preposition
    (if any) that follows the conjugated verb. Adverbial pronouns are always placed in this position.

    • Je dois me les brosser. > I need to brush them.
    • Je vais te le donner. > I’m going to give it to you.
    • Nous espérons y aller. > We hope to go there.
    • Je promets de le manger. > I promise to eat it.
    • Il continuera à t’en parler. > He’ll continue to talk to you about it.

    Sometimes the object pronoun should precede the first verb. In order to determine this, think about which verb is being modified. Why? Because in French, the object pronoun must go in front of the verb it modifies. The wrong place may give you a grammatically incorrect sentence or may even change the meaning of the sentence. Consider the examples in this chart.

    Correct Pronoun Placement

    X Il aide à nous travailler. X He’s helping work us.
    Il nous aide à travailler. He’s helping us work.
    X Elle invite à me venir. X She’s inviting to come me.
    Elle m’invite à venir. She’s inviting me to come.
    X Je promets de te manger. X I promise to eat you.
    Je te promets de manger. I promise you that I’ll eat.
    Je promets de le manger. I promise that I’ll eat it.
    Je te promets de le manger. I promise you that I’ll eat it.

    Negative Constructions

    Negative structures surround the conjugated verb and precede the preposition (if any).

    Correct Negative Structure Placement

    Je ne vais pas étudier. I’m not going to study.
    Nous n’espérons jamais voyager. We never hope to travel.
    Je ne promets que de travailler. I only promise to work.
    Il ne continue pas à lire.

    He’s not continuing to read.

    Pronouns Plus Negative Construction

    In a sentence with both pronouns and a negative structure, the order is:

    ne + object pronoun (if applicable) + conjugated verb + part two of negative structure + preposition (if any) + object pronoun(s) + adverbial pronoun(s) + infinitive

    Correct Placement of Pronouns and Negative Structures

    Je ne vais jamais te le donner. I’m never going to give it to you.
    Nous n’espérons pas y aller. We don’t hope to go there.
    Il ne continue pas à y travailler. He isn’t continuing to work there.
    Je ne promets pas de le manger. I don’t promise to eat it.
    Je ne te promets pas de le manger. I don’t promise you that I’ll eat it.
    Je ne te promets pas d’y aller. I don’t promise you that I’ll go there.

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    Date Posted: 8th August 2017

    Learning a language involves dealing with different aspects of the language. Languages differ in many respects which can affect how easy or difficult it is to learn another language. Some languages are similar to each other (Spanish and Italian, for example) which can make it relatively easy for a Spanish-speaker to pick up Italian. Other languages, though, can be completely different (French and Arabic) so speakers of the one learning the other may experience difficulties.

    These differences can relate to sounds and pronunciation, alphabet and word order. Here we will look at a few languages and compare them to English in terms of word order, to help us understand what problems our learners may have.

    Let’s start with English.

    English is an SVO language. This means that sentences in English follow the formula Subject-Verb-Object. Sentences need to follow this pattern or else the meaning of the sentence changes or the sentence won’t make sense.

    Consider the following:

    John ate a doughnut.

    *A doughnut ate John.

    Here the second sentence is nonsensical.

    Thomas hit Sam.

    Sam hit Thomas.

    Here the second sentence does not have the same meaning as the first sentence.

    Other languages which follow the SVO formula include the Romance languages – including Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese and SwaHili.

    Other languages follow a slightly different formula: SOV, or Subject-Object-Verb. This includes Korean, Turkish, Punjabi and Tamil. In SOV languages, a sentence such as this is grammatically correct:

    She the book read

    Then there are VSO languages which construct sentences Verb-Subject-Object. Arabic is one such language which follows this pattern, as illustrated by this sentence:

    Ate she bread.

    As you can imagine, this can cause confusion for speakers of other languages when learning English. If you are accustomed to constructing sentences in a certain order, remembering to change this order when speaking English can take time and practice.

    Of course, this is a rather simple way of looking at sentence structure in language but it is an easy way to try to understand one of the many difficulties your students may face.

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