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In linguistic typology, 'subject-verb-object' ('SVO'), is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. The SVO and Subject Object Verb orders are by far the two most common, accounting for more than 75% of the world's languages which have a preferred order.^[1] English^[2], Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, the Romance languages, Russian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay, Rotuman and Indonesian are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. All the Scandinavian languages follow this order also but change to VSO when asking a question.
An example of SVO order in English is:
:''Sam ate oranges.''
In this, ''Sam'' is the subject, ''ate'' is the verb, ''oranges'' is the object.
Some languages are more complicated: in German and in Dutch, an ancestral SOV order is retained in subordinate clauses even though SVO is the unmarked order in main declarative clauses. (See V2 word order.) English developed from such languages itself, and still bears traces of this word order, for example in the case of reported speech, e.g. ''"Oranges," said Sam'', although such usage is itself in decline in favour of SVO ''Sam said "Oranges."''

Contents

See Also

Sources

See Also

★ Subject Object Verb

★ Object Subject Verb

★ Object Verb Subject

★ Verb Object Subject

★ Verb Subject Object

Sources

1. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, , David, Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-55967-7
2. OSV is also used, largely in poetry.