Subject Object Verb
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Template:Linguistic typology topics
Subject Object Verb (SOV) is a term used in linguistic typology to state the general order of words in a language's sentences: "Sam oranges ate". The SOV type is the most common type found in natural languages. It corresponds roughly to reverse Polish notation in computer languages. Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Latin and most Indian languages belong to this category. German and Dutch use SVO in main clauses, but employ SOV in subordinate clauses.
SOV languages tend to have the adjectives before nouns, to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place relative clauses before the nouns to which they refer, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Some have special particles to separate the subject from the object, such as the Japanese wa. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases.
An example in Japanese is:私は昨日ご飯を食べた watashi wa kinou gohan o tabeta ("I ate rice yesterday"), in which watashi is the subject (topic, to be precise), gohan is the object and tabeta is the verb (past tense form of "taberu").
The other permutations in the order of most common to rarest are:
- Subject Verb Object Sam ate oranges. (e.g. English, Spanish, Italian, Kiswahili, Chinese)
- Verb Subject Object Ate Sam oranges. (e.g. Welsh and Arabic)
- Verb Object Subject Ate oranges Sam. (e.g. Fijian)
- Object Subject Verb Oranges Sam ate. (e.g. Xavante)
- Object Verb Subject Oranges ate Sam. (e.g. Guarijio, Hixkaryana, and Klingon)
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Subject_Object_Verb" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_Object_Verb, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
