Jump to content

Agent–object–verb: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Content deleted Content added
No edit summary
m Bot: Fixing double redirect to Subject–object–verb word order
Tag: Redirect target changed
 
(40 intermediate revisions by 27 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
#REDIRECT [[Subject–object–verb word order]]
{{Linguistic_typology_topics}}
In [[linguistic typology]], '''Subject Object Verb''' (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order.
If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence.
Among natural languages, SOV is the most common type.
It corresponds roughly to [[reverse Polish notation]] in computer languages.
The SOV languages include [[Turkish language|Turkish]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]], [[Korean language|Korean]], [[Mongolian language|Mongolian]], [[Persian language|Persian]], [[Latin]], [[Burmese language|Burmese]] and most [[Indian languages]].

[[German language|German]] and [[Dutch language|Dutch]] are basically SVO, but employ SOV in subordinate clauses. See [[V2 word order]]. [[French language|French]] and [[Spanish language|Spanish]] are SVO, but use SOV when a pronoun is used as the (direct or indirect) object: e.g., "Sam a mangé des oranges" or "Sam comió naranjas" (Sam ate oranges) would become "Sam les a mangées" or "Sam las comió" (Sam them ate). This type of ordering is sometimes (although rarely) used in English under [[poetic license]], especially in works of [[William Shakespeare]].

SOV languages tend to have the adjectives before nouns, to use [[postposition]]s rather than [[preposition]]s, to place relative clauses before the nouns to which they refer, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Some have special [[grammatical particle|particle]]s to distinguish the subject and the object, such as the Japanese ''ga'' and ''o''. SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a [[Time Manner Place|Time-Manner-Place]] ordering of prepositional phrases.

An example in [[Japanese language|Japanese]] is:
私は箱を開けます。(watashi wa hako wo akemasu.) meaning "I open a/the box/boxes." In this sentence, 私 (watashi) is the subject (or more specifically, topic) meaning "I" as in first person singular, and it is followed by the は (wa) topic-marker. 箱 (hako) is the object meaning box (in Japanese no distinction is made between whether a word uses "a" or "the", or plural or singular unless specifically stated), followed by を (wo) which is the object-marker in Japanese. 開けます (akemasu) is the polite non-past form of the verb which means "to open" and is at the end of the sentence.

Although [[Latin]] was an [[inflected language]], the most usual word order was SOV. An example would be: "servus puellam amat", meaning "The slave loves the girl." In this sentence, "servus" is the subject, "puellam" is the object and "amat" is the verb.

==See also==

* [[Topic-prominent language]]
* [[Verb Subject Object]]
* [[Subject Verb Object]]

[[be:SOV]]
[[es:Sujeto Objeto Verbo]]
[[eo:Subjekto Objekto Verbo]]
[[fr:Langue SOV]]
[[ja:SOV型]]
[[pl:SOV]]
[[sv:SOV-språk]]

Latest revision as of 01:50, 20 February 2022