Subject–object–verb


In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate oranges".
The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects.

Incidence

Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type.
Languages that have SOV structure include Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Assyrian, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Cherokee, Dakota, Dogon languages, Elamite, Ancient Greek, Gujarati, Hajong, Hindi, Hittite, Hopi, Ijoid languages, Itelmen, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Korean, Kurdish, Classical Latin, Lakota, Manchu, Mande languages, Marathi, Mongolian, Navajo, Nepali, Newari, Nivkh, Nobiin, Omaha, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Senufo languages, Seri, Sicilian, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Sunuwar and most other Indo-Iranian languages, Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages, Sumerian, Tibetan and nearly all other Tibeto-Burman languages, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and all other Dravidian languages, Tigrinya, Turkish and other Turkic languages, Urdu, almost all Uto-Aztecan languages, Uzbek, Yukaghir, and virtually all Caucasian languages.
Standard Mandarin is SVO, but for simple sentences with a clear context, word order is flexible enough to allow for SOV or OSV. Some Romance languages are SVO, but when the object is an enclitic pronoun, word order allows for SOV. German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. They can be considered SOV but with V2 word order as an overriding rule for the finite verb in main clauses, which results in SVO in some cases and SOV in others. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" is in SVO word order. Non-finite verbs are placed at the end, however, since V2 only applies to the finite verb: "Ich will etwas über Karl sagen". In a subordinate clause, the finite verb is not affected by V2, and also appears at the end of the sentence, resulting in full SOV order: "Ich sage, dass Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat."
A rare example of SOV word order in English is "I thee wed " in the wedding vow "With this ring, I thee wed."

Properties

SOV languages have a strong tendency to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb, to place genitive noun phrases before the possessed noun, to place a name before a title or honorific and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. They have a weaker but significant tendency to place demonstrative adjectives before the nouns they modify. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals SOV word order, but the reverse does not hold: SOV languages feature prenominal and postnominal relative clauses roughly equally. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a time–manner–place ordering of adpositional phrases.
In linguistic typology, one can usefully distinguish two types of SOV languages in terms of their type of marking:
  1. dependent-marking has case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows it to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. This type usually places adjectives and numerals before the nouns they modify, and is exclusively suffixing without prefixes. SOV languages of this first type include Japanese and Tamil.
  2. head-marking distinguishes subject and object by affixes on the verb rather than markers on the nouns. It also differs from the dependent-marking SOV language in using prefixes as well as suffixes, usually for tense and possession. Adjectives in this type are much more verb-like than in dependent-marking SOV languages, and hence they usually follow the nouns. In most SOV languages with a significant level of head-marking or verb-like adjectives, numerals and related quantifiers also follow the nouns they modify. Languages of this type include Navajo and Seri.
In practice, of course, the distinction between these two types is far from sharp. Many SOV languages are substantially double-marking and tend to exhibit properties intermediate between the two idealised types above.
Many languages that have shifted to SVO-word order from the original SOV retain the properties: for example, the Finnish language

Examples

Albanian

Armenian

Basque

in short sentences, usually, subject or agent–object–verb; in long sentences, usually, subject or agent-verb-objects):

Bengali

Burmese

is an analytic language.

Chinese

Generally, Chinese varieties all feature SVO word order. However, especially in Standard Mandarin, SOV is tolerated as well. There is even a special structure to form an SOV sentence.
SOV structure is also widely used in railway contact in order to clarify the objective of the order.
The following example that uses 把 is controversially labelled as SOV. 把 may be interpreted as a verb, meaning "to hold". However, it does not mean to hold something literally or physically. Rather, the object is held mentally, and then another verb is acted on the object.

Dutch

is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb remains in final position, but the finite verb is moved to the second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, non-finite verbs and compound verbs follow this pattern:
Pure SOV order is found in subordinate clauses:

French

The French language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure but places proclitics before the verb when using most pronouns, which is sometimes mistaken for SOV word order.

Georgian

The Georgian language isn't extremely rigid with regards to word order, but is typically either SOV or SVO.

German

is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb remains in final position, but the finite verb is moved to the second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, compound verbs follow this pattern:
The word order changes also depending on whether the phrase is a main clause or a dependent clause. In dependent clauses, the word order is always entirely SOV :

Greek (Classical)">Ancient Greek">Greek (Classical)

Hajong

're is a particle that indicates the accusative case and 'sei' indicates past tense declarative. Here, 'e is pronounced as the 'i' in 'girl' and 'ei' is pronounced as the 'ay' in 'say'.

Hindi

Hungarian

word order is free, although the meaning slightly changes. Almost all permutations of the following sample are valid, but with stress on different parts of the meaning.

Italian

The Italian language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure, but when an enclitic pronoun is used, this comes before the verb and the auxiliary.

Japanese

The markers が and を are, respectively, subject and object markers for the words that precede them. Technically, the sentence could be translated a number of ways, but this does not affect the SOV analysis.
Japanese has some flexibility in word order, so an OSV is also possible.

Kannada

Kashmiri

Like German and Dutch, the Indo-Aryan language Kashmiri is SOV combined with V2 word order. The non-finite verb remains in final position, but the finite part of the verb appears in second position. Simple verbs look like SVO, whereas auxiliated verbs are discontinuous and adhere to this pattern:
Given that Kashmiri is a V2 language, if the word tsũũţh 'apple' comes first then the subject kuur 'girl' must follow the auxiliary chhi 'is': tsũũţh chhi kuur khyevaan
Also, the word order changes depending on whether the phrase is in a main clause or in certain kinds of dependent clause. For instance, in relative clauses, the word order is SOVAux:

Kazakh

Like in Japanese, OSV is possible too.

Korean

'가 /이 ' is a particle that indicates the subject. '를 /을 ' is a particle that indicates the object. The consonant 'ㄹ ' in the verb stem is dropped before the suffix.
※ Here, '나 ' is changed to '내 ' before '가 '.

Kurdish

Kyrgyz

Latin

was an inflected language and had a very flexible word order and sentence structure, but the most usual word order in formal prose was SOV.
Again, there are multiple valid translations that do not affect the overall analysis.

Malayalam

Marathi

Mongolian

Nepali

Ossetian

Pashto

Persian

Portuguese

is an SVO language, but it has some SOV constructs.
In case of proclisis:
SentenceTodos aqui te amam.---
WordTodosaquiteamam
GlossEverybodyhereyou love
PartsSubjectObjectVerb-
TranslationEverybody here loves you.---

SentenceAquilo me entristeceu.--
WordAquilomeentristeceu
GlossIt/thatme saddened
PartsSubjectObjectVerb
TranslationIt saddened me.--

When using a temporal adverb, optionally with the negative:
SentenceNós já os temos.---
WordNósjá ostemos
GlossWealready them have
PartsSubjectObjectVerb-
Translation We already have them.
We do not have them anymore.		---

SentenceNós ainda os temos.---
WordNósainda ostemos
GlossWestill them have
PartsSubjectObjectVerb-
Translation We still have them.
We have do not them yet.		---

There is an infix construction for the future and conditional tenses:
SentenceEu fá-lo-ei amanhã.--
WordEufá-lo-eiamanhã
GlossIdo-it-willtomorrow
PartsSubjectObjectVerb
TranslationI will do it tomorrow.--

SVO form: Eu hei-de fazê-lo amanhã or eu farei o mesmo amanhã

Punjabi

Punjabi is very flexible in word order and is written in two writing systems, Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi - which is written from right-to-left.

Quechua

Quechuan languages have standard SOV word order. The following example is from Bolivian Quechua.

Russian

is an inflected language and very flexible in word order; it allows all possible word combinations. However, it is generally considered a SVO language.
for example: Она любит его, любит его oна, любит oна его, and virtually all re-orderings of Russian sentence order are correct although this is often used in different situations to emphasize particular constituents of a sentence. Who loves him? 'she' is the one who loves him. In this way any part of the sentence can be emphasized without changing basic meaning

Sanskrit

, like its predecessor, Vedic, is an inflected language and very flexible in word order; it allows all possible word combinations. However, it is generally considered a SOV language.

Somali

generally uses the subject–object–verb structure when speaking formally.

Spanish

The Spanish language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure, but when an enclitic pronoun is used, this comes before the verb and the auxiliary. Sometimes, in dual-verb constructions involving the infinitive and the gerund, the enclitic pronoun can be put before both verbs, or attached to the end of the second verb.

Talysh

Tamil

Tamil being a strongly head-final language, the basic word-order is SOV. However, since it is highly inflected, word order is flexible and is used for pragmatic purposes. That is, fronting a word in a sentence adds emphasis on it; for instance, a VSO order would indicate greater emphasis on the verb, the action, than on the subject or the object. However, such word-orders are highly marked, and the basic order remains SOV.

Telugu

Tigrinya

The Tigrinya language usually uses a subject–verb–object structure.

Turkish

Like all other Turkic languages, Turkish has flexibility in word order, so any order is possible. For example, in addition to the SOV order above, this sentence could also be constructed as OSV, OVS, VSO, VOS, or SVO, but these other orders carry a connotation of emphasis of importance on either the subject, object, or the verb. The SOV order is the "default" one that does not connote particular emphasis on any part of the sentence.

Udmurt

Urdu

Uzbek

The marker "ga" is a dative case marker for the object that precedes it.
Due to flexibility in word order in Uzbek, it is possible to transform the sentence into OSV as well.

Yi

Zarma