Agent–object–verb

In linguistic typology, Agent Object Verb (AOV) or Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the agent, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. If English were AOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence. Among natural languages, AOV is the most common type. It corresponds roughly to reverse Polish notation in computer languages. The AOV languages include Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Ainu, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Itelmen, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, [[Burushaski Burushaski, Basque, Latin, Burmese, Tibetan, Amharic, Tigrinya, Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Kabardian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Navajo, Hopi, Aymara, Quechua, Pāli, Nepali, Sinhalese and most Indian languages.

German and Dutch are considered AVO in conventional typology and AOV in generative grammar. See V2 word order. French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are AVO, but use AOV when a pronoun is used as the (direct or indirect) object: e.g., "Sam a mangé des oranges", "Sam comeu laranjas" or "Sam comió naranjas" or "Sam ha mangiato delle arance" (Sam ate oranges) would become "Sam les a mangées", "Sam as comeu" or "Sam las comió" or "Sam le ha mangiate" (Sam them ate). This type of ordering is sometimes (although rarely) used in English under poetic license, especially in works of William Shakespeare.

AOV languages have a strong tendency to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb, to place genitive noun phrases before the possessed noun, and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals AOV word order, though the reverse does not hold: AOV languages feature prenominal and postnominal relative clauses roughly equally. Some have special particles to distinguish the subject and the object, such as the Japanese ga and o. AOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases. Within Eurasia AOV languages often place adjectives before the nouns they modify, and this is often cited as a universal tendency of AOV languages; however, outside Eurasia AOV languages usually place adjectives after the modified noun.

An example in 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, pronounced "oh" in this usage) 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. Typical polite usage habitually suppresses direct reference to persons, preferring instead verbs of implied direction: 本を下さい　(hon o kudasai, "Please give me the book"), a literal approximation for which might be, "hand the book down, please," although the English is far too breezy in tone.

Although Latin was an inflected language, the most usual word order was AOV. 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