Word order
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Word order, in linguistic typology, refers to the order in which words appear in sentences across different languages. In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions. However, most languages are generally assumed to have a basic word order. That word order is unmarked. That is, it contains no extra information to the listener. For example, English is AVO (agent-verb-object), as in I don't know this but OAV is also possible: This I don't know. This process is called topic-fronting (also topicalization) and is extremely common. OAV in English is a marked word order because it emphasises the object.
An example of OAV being used for emphasis:
- A: I can't see Alice.
- B: What about Bill?
- A: Bill I can see. (rather than I can see Bill)
Sentence word orders
These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest:
- AOV languages include the prototypical Japanese, Turkish and Korean, as well as many others using this most common word order. Some, like Persian, have AOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages.
- German and Dutch are AOV with V2 word order.
- Mandarin is AVO but has many AOV characteristics.
- VAO languages include Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages and Hawai'ian.
- VOA languages include Fijian and Malagasy.
- OAV languages include Xavante.
- OVA languages include Hixkaryana.
- Others, such as Latin and Finnish have no fixed word order (although in the case of both languages AOV is the most frequent word order), meaning that the sentence structure is extremely flexible.
It is not understood why word orders with the agent before the object are much more common than word orders with the object before the agent. It must be noted that in most nominative-accusative languages there is the tendency to identify the agent with the topic (who or what is being talked about), creating a subject, and to place the topic at the beginning of the sentence so as to establish the context quickly.
Some languages can be said to have more than one basic word order. French is AVO, but it incorporates or cliticizes objective pronouns before the verb. This makes French AOV in some sentences. However, speaking of a language having a given word order is generally understood as a reference to the basic, unmarked, non-emphatic word order for sentences with constituents expressed by full nouns or noun phrases. In other languages the word order of transitive and intransitive clauses may not correspond. Russian, for example, has AVO transitive clauses but free order (SV or VS) in intransitive clauses.
Phrase word orders and branching
There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, AOV languages generally put modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) before what they modify (nouns and verbs), and use postpositions. VAO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For AVO languages, either order is common.
For example, French (AVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture grande). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads. On the other hand, in English (also AVO) adjectives always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved).
Further reading
- Syntactic and Paratactic Word Order Effects (PDF) Analysis of different types of word order variations across languages. Technical, but contains non-technical appendix.
- The Language Instinct - Good general introduction to linguistics.de:Satzstellung
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