Word order

Key takeaways

Word order belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Word order to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Word order from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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 languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest.

Order types 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, with other word orders considered "marked". Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O). Subject and object are here understood to be nouns, since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties. Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders:

about 45% of the world's languages deploy subject–object–verb order (SOV); about 42% 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.

Constituent word orders 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 (Subject-Object-Verb) 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 Arabic (dialects), English, Spanish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, the Chinese languages and Swahili, among others. "She loves him." VSO languages include Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages, Mayan, and the Philippine languages. "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, like German and Dutch, have SOV (Subject-object-verb) 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 Arabic, Latin, Greek, Persian, Romanian, Assyrian, Assamese, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, and Basque have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. 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 (Subject-Verb-Object) word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses. Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. ("O" for object may be replaced with "P" for "patient" as well.) Thus, Russian is fixed AVO (Agent-Verb-Object) 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 (Verb-Object-Absolutive), 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 (Verb-Object-Subject) word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.

Distribution of word order types Every language falls under one of the six word order types; the unfixed type is somewhat disputed in the community, as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct. The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer. The 2005 study surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies.

Hammarström (2016) 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.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Word order

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Word order claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Word order before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Word order ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Word order

In research: Word order appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Word order in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Word order is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Syntactic relationships, Syntax, Word order, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Word order outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Word order in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Word order means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Word order out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Word order in simple terms?

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 languages employ different orders.

Why does Word order matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Word order?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Word order.