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In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntax 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. The primary word orders that are of interest are
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 Pragmatics information, such as topicalisation or focus. However, even languages with flexible word order have a preferred or basic word order,Bernard Comrie. (1981). Language universals and linguistic typology: syntax and morphology (2nd ed). University of Chicago Press, Chicago with other word orders considered "markedness".
Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O).Rijkhoff, Jan (2004), The Noun Phrase, Oxford University Press, . Subject and object are here understood to be , since often tend to display different word order properties. (1963). 9781503623217, MIT Press. ISBN 9781503623217 Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders:
Sometimes patterns are more complex: some Germanic languages 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 language, Latin, Greek language, Persian language, Romanian, Assyrian, Assamese, Russian language, Turkish language, Korean language, Japanese, Finnish language, and Basque language have no strict word order; rather, the Syntax 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 grammar 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 (Absolutive-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.
The table below displays the word order surveyed by Matthew 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 family, the distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure, meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure.
Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.
The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V, however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.
A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt wen?' Whom (OVS/SVO)
B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark ist der, den sie liebt' She (SVO/OSV)
C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?' Does (VSO)
In ( A), the first sentence shows the word order used for wh-questions in English and German. The second sentence is an echo question; it would be uttered only after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question. One could replace the word wen whom (which indicates that this sentence is a question) with an identifier such as Mark: 'Kate liebt Mark?' Kate. In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify the sentence as a question.
In ( B), the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in ( A). The second sentence emphasizes that Kate does indeed love Mark, and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love. However, a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech (or even in written language), be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer the echo question in ( A) simply by restating: Mark!. This is the same for both languages.
In yes–no questions such as ( C), English and German use subject-verb inversion. But, whereas English relies on do-support to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries, German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions, even from lexical verbs.
Despite this, English, as opposed to German, has very strict word order. In German, word order can be used as a means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 (verb-first) word order is used. And lastly, dependent clauses use verb-final word order. However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on the placement of the subject and object(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb).
Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions ( in London), postpositions ( London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately ( For whom? or Whom for?) or at the same time ( from her away; Dutch example: met hem mee meaning together with him).
There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use (some, such a modern Persian, are unusual, being SOV but using prepositions and placing adjectives after nouns). VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use . For SVO languages, either order is common (for example, Swahili language, English, Romance languages use prepositions, Finnish language on the other hand uses postpositions).
For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places most adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture), or both, depending on the context. On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as , which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов= six houses, домов шесть= circa six houses).
Typologically, there is a trend that high-animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low-animacy undergoers; this trend can come through even in languages with free word order, giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS order in ergative systems; however, ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy, sometimes giving way to an accusative system (see split ergativity).Comrie, Bernard (1981). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology (2nd edn). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as Polish language, Hungarian, Spanish language, Latin, Albanian, and O'odham. In some languages, a general word order can be identified, but this is much harder in others.
The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb.
For "Kate ate a piece of cake", the possibilities are:
The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that the order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above. These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged.
The emphasis can be on the action (verb) itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action (verb), as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb (in the above example 'meg'), then the co-verb is separated from the verb, and always follows the verb. Also the enclitic -t marks the direct object: 'torta' (cake) + '-t' -> 'tortát'.
Braces ( { }) are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns, which may be implicit in Portuguese. Because of conjugation, the grammatical person is recovered.
The subject, verb, and object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last. Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question:Spevak, Olga (2010). Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose, p. 1, quoting Weil (1844).
Latin prose often follows the word order "Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb",Devine, Andrew M. & Laurence D. Stephens (2006), Latin Word Order, p. 79. but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify, but some categories, such as those that determine or specify (e.g. Via Appia "Appian Way"), usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion.
In these examples, "(mua)" can be omitted when not in first position, causing a perceivable change in emphasis; the latter being of different intensity. "Më" is always followed by the verb. Thus, a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and two objects (a direct and an indirect one), can be
expressed in six ways without "mua", and in twenty-four ways with "mua", adding up to thirty possible combinations.
Those examples are all grammatically valid variations on the sentence "The cowboy is branding the calves," but some are rarely found in natural speech, as is discussed in Grammaticality.
This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage.
A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic. There are some verbs, however, that are entirely acceptable in this format:
This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic. This is due to the verb "to be", which acts as both Auxiliary verb and main verb. Similarly, other auxiliary and allow for VSO word order ("Must he perish?"). Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage ("Did he buy the book?"). Shakespeare's usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before.
This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic language, the language of the Christian Church in Egypt.
"Kate loves Mark."
"Mark Kate loves."
Here SVO is changed to OSV to emphasize the object.
41.0% 35.4% 6.9% 1.8% 0.8% 0.3% 13.7% 56.6% 13.0% 6.3% 3.5% 0.7% 0.2% 6.1%
Functions of constituent word order
Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of Verb argument and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian language.
Semantics of word order
In many languages, standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis. In languages such as O'odham and Hungarian, which are discussed below, almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical, but not all of them are used. In languages such as English and German, word order is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences:
Phrase word orders and branching
The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and/or after the head noun.
Pragmatic word order
Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However, the degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order: some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking, while others (such as some varieties of Datooga language) may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments.
(1992). 9789027229052 ISBN 9789027229052 When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the topic-comment.
Hungarian
Word order in Hungarian sentences can change according to the speaker's communicative intentions. Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence, distinguishing the emphatic part that carries new information (rheme) from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information (theme).
Hindi-Urdu
Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions explicitly mark the relationships of noun phrases to the other sentence constituents.Yamuna Kachru (2025). 902723812X, John Benjamins Publishing Company. 902723812X Word order in Hindustani does not usually encode grammatical functions. (1994). 9781881526490, Center for the Study of Language (CSLI). ISBN 9781881526490 Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in a sentence is usually the topic, which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle " to" (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は (wa).Kuno 1981Kidwai 2000 (2025). 9783110207767 ISBN 9783110207767 Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows:
Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence " The girl received a gift from the boy on her birthday." are shown below.
Portuguese
In Portuguese, clitic pronouns and allow many different orders:
Latin
In Classical Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles.
Albanian
Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, Albanian permits a large variety of word order combinations. In the spoken language, an alternative word order to the most common S-V-O helps the speaker to emphasise a word and hence make a nuanced change to the meaning. For example:
O'odham (Papago-Pima)
O'odham is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. It has free word order, with only the auxiliary bound to one spot. Here is an example in literal translation: (1992). 9789027229052 ISBN 9789027229052
Other issues with word order
Language change
Languages change over time. When language change involves a shift in a language's syntax, this is called syntactic change. An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution. In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct:
(2025). 9789027227812 ISBN 9789027227812 Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example:
(2025). 9789027237200 ISBN 9789027237200
Dialectal variation
There are some languages which have different preferred word orders in different dialects. One such case is Andean Spanish, spoken in Peru. While Spanish is classified as an SVO language, (2025). 9780203426531 ISBN 9780203426531 Peruvian Spanish has been influenced by Quechua and Aymara, both SOV languages. This has led to some first-language (L1) Spanish speakers using OV word order in more sentences than would be expected. L2 speakers in Peru also use this word order.
Poetry
Poetry and stories can use different word orders to emphasize certain aspects of the sentence. In English, this is called anastrophe. Here is an example:
Translation
Differences in word order complicate translation and language education – in addition to changing individual words, the order must be changed. The area of linguistics that is concerned with translation and education is language acquisition. The reordering of words can cause problems when transcribing stories. Rhyme schemes can change, as well as the meaning behind the words. This can be especially problematic when translating poetry.
See also
Notes
Further reading
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