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Questions tagged [svo]

subject - verb - object word order.

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What are the general word order trends of VO languages

I’ve heard that some scholars collapse SVO, VSO, and VOS into one general category of VO. From what I understand, these VO languages allegedly exhibit strong and weak common word order trends. If this ...
Quinali Solaji's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
247 views

Why do dominant VSO languages all have SVO as an alternative word order?

According to Greenberg’s 6th universal, "All languages with dominant VSO order have SVO as an alternative or as the only alternative basic order." Why are dominant VSO languages predisposed ...
Quinali Solaji's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
157 views

Do all languages have the subordinate clause next to the conjunction?

There are example languages for almost all the possible orderings of subject, verb and object in a simple sentence, with the order of frequency being: SOV > SVO > VSO > VOS > OVS > OSV. ...
Rachel's user avatar
  • 11
1 vote
1 answer
262 views

SVO triple in case of missing S or V or O?

hi I'm new to phrase/dependency structure. For a project of mine I want to extract from any sentence a meaningful structure with 3 items i.e. triple. In general case the Subject-Verb-Object is ideal....
sten's user avatar
  • 127
9 votes
4 answers
10k views

Why are French, Italian, Spanish etc. listed as SVO languages?

In this Wikipedia article, French, Italian and Spanish are listed as SVO languages, along with English and Chinese. (However, Latin is listed as SOV.) I am highly confused about such statement. In ...
iBug's user avatar
  • 417
2 votes
1 answer
671 views

How VSO or SOV languages deal with nouns with lots of adjectives

With x V y structure, you divide the (potentially) long nouns/adjective phrases into parts separated by the verb, so mentally you can group everything pretty quickly. But if it is V x y, or even x y V,...
Lance Pollard's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
3k views

Why are Latin descendants SVO?

Latin was a language which predominant order was Subject-Object-Verb, as in the example proverb Errare Humanum Est So, why all its modern descendents are predominantly Subject-Verb-Object order? Or ...
sergiol's user avatar
  • 377
2 votes
1 answer
453 views

Diagnostic tests for basic word order of subject-verb-object in a topic-comment language?

I'm trying to grok ASL's grammar. There seems to be a lot of folk grammar and the professional liguists haven't been studying it for very long so there is a lot of contradictory statments about what ...
MatthewMartin's user avatar