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Subject Verb Object
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.[1] English, informal Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, Russian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay, 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).
- ^ Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55967-7.