Agent–object–verb
| Linguistic typology |
|---|
| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
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 uses SVO in main clauses, but employs 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 tendancy 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 wo 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 rough order of importance:
- Subject Verb Object (e.g. English, Spanish, Italian, Kiswahili, Chinese)
- Verb Subject Object (e.g. Welsh and Arabic)
- Verb Object Subject (e.g. Fijian)
- Object Subject Verb (e.g. Xavante)
Of some interesting note is that Object Verb Subject is statistically negligible as a word order in native languages. Dr. Marc Okrand (a linguist) used this information when designing the Klingon language in order to make more alien like.