Word order


In linguistics, word 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
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 in combination with two arguments, namely the subject, and object. 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:
These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest :
Sometimes patterns are more complex: some Germanic languages, like German and Dutch, have SOV 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 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. Thus, Russian is fixed AVO 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, 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 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.
Word OrderNumber Percentage Number Percentage
SOV49740.5%56541.0%
SVO43535.4%48835.4%
VSO856.9%956.9%
VOS262.1%251.8%
OVS90.7%110.8%
OSV40.3%40.3%
Unfixed17214.0%18913.7%

Hammarström 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.
Word OrderNo. of LanguagesPercentageNo. of FamiliesPercentage
SOV227543.3%23956.6%
SVO211740.3%5513.0%
VSO5039.5%276.3%
VOS1743.3%153.5%
OVS400.7%30.7%
OSV190.3%10.2%
Unfixed1242.3%266.1%

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 is a fixed order of arguments 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.
Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information tends to precede new information. Furthermore, acting participants are more likely to be talked about than things simply undergoing actions. 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.

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:
A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt wen?'
B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark ist der, den sie liebt'
C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?'
In, 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 with an identifier such as Mark: 'Kate liebt Mark?' . 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, the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in. 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, be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer the echo question in simply by restating: Mark!. This is the same for both languages.
In yes–no questions such as, 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 language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 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, even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed.