Subject Verb Object

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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. Together with the SOV order, SVO is one of the two most common orders, accounting for more than 75% of the world's languages between them. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology (possibly through 'physical metaphor', as in the case of a thrown object, where attention naturally passes from a thrower (object) to the path of a flying object (verb) and then to the target (subject)). However, this has not been scientifically examined.

English, informal Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, Russian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay, Latvian, Rotuman and Indonesian are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. The Romance languages also follow SVO construction, except for constructions in many of the languages where a pronoun functions as the object (eg. French: Je t'aime lit. I you love). All of the Scandinavian languages follow this order also but change to VSO when asking a question. Some of these languages, such as English, can also use an OSV structure in certain literary styles, such as poetry.

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, SVO in main clauses coexists with SOV in subordinate clauses (See V2 word order.) English developed from such languages itself, and still bears traces of this word order, for example in locative inversion ("In the garden sat a cat") and some clauses with only (only then do we find X).

See also

• Subject Object Verb
• Object Subject Verb
• Object Verb Subject
• Verb Object Subject
• Verb Subject Object

Sources

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Last updated on Thursday February 14, 2008 at 04:04:57 PST (GMT -0800)
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