The main pattern of basic word order in English declarative sentences is SUBJECT + PREDICATE + OBJECT, often called SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT (for example: Tom writes stories). It means that if these three parts of the sentence are present in a statement (a declarative sentence), the subject is placed before the predicate, the predicate (the main verb) follows the subject, and the object is placed after the main verb. Adverbial modifiers are placed after the object, and adjectives are placed before their nouns.
Of course, some sentences may have just one word (Write!), or only the subject and predicate (Tom writes), or have an adverbial modifier and no object (Tom writes well), and there are peculiarities, exceptions and preferences in word order, but the pattern SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT (Tom writes stories) is the most typical and the most common pattern of standard word order in English that serves as a basis for word order in different types of sentences.
These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest:
· SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include the prototypical Japanese, Mongolian, Basque, Turkish, Korean, the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages. Some, like Persian and Latin, have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages.
· SVO languages include English, the Romance languages, Bulgarian, Chinese and Swahili, among others.
· VSO languages include Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages, and Hawaiian.
· VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy.
· OVS languages include Hixkaryana.
· OSV languages include Xavante and Warao.
Sometimes patterns are more complex: German, Dutch and Frisian have SOV in subordinates, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.
Others, such as Latin and Finnish, have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent, and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles, for example Puun kaatoi mies (tree-acc fell-perf man.NOM) ~ A/the man felled the tree but puut kaatoivat miehet (tree-pl.nom/acc fell-perf-3p.pl man-pl.nom/acc) ~ The trees felled the men. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses.
English sentences are divided into statements, questions, commands and exclamatory sentences. Word order in different types of sentences has certain peculiarities.
Statements are the most common type of sentences. A standard statement uses the basic word order pattern, i.e. SUBJECT + VERB (+ object + adverbial modifier). Adverbial modifiers are placed at the end of the sentence after the object (or after the verb, if there is no object). Attributes (adjectives, numerals, etc.) are placed before their nouns, and attributes in the form of nouns with prepositions are placed after their nouns.
Maria works.
Tom writes stories.
He talked to Anna yesterday.
My son bought three history books.
Tom writes short stories for children.
General questions
Auxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier):
Does he know English well?
Is he writing a report now?
Have you seen this film?
Special questions
Question word + auxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier), for example:
Where does he live?
What are you writing now?
When did they visit Mexico?
Alternative questions
Alternative questions have the same word order as general questions:
Does he live in Paris or Rome?
Are you writing a report or a letter?
Tag questions
Tag questions consist of two parts. The first part has the same word order as statements, and the second part is a short general question (the tag):
He lives here, doesn't he?
They haven't seen this film, have they?
Commands have the same word order as statements, but the subject (you) is usually omitted:
Go to your room.
Listen to the story.
Exclamatory sentences have the same word order as statements (i.e., the subject is before the predicate):
She is a great singer!
It is an excellent opportunity!
How well he knows history!
What a beautiful town this is!
How strange it is!
In some types of exclamatory sentences, the subject (it, this, that) and the linking verb are often omitted, for example:
What a pity!
What a beautiful present!
How strange!
English sentences are also divided into simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences.
A simple sentence, also called an independent clause, has a subject and predicate and other necessary parts of the sentence, for example:
Life goes on.
She lives in Moscow.
He wrote a letter to the manager.
A compound sentence has two SUBJECT + VERB pairs and two independent clauses connected by the conjunctions “and, but, or”, for example:
Maria lives in Moscow, and her friend Elizabeth lives in New York.
He wrote a letter to the manager, but the manager didn't answer.
A complex sentence has one SUBJECT + VERB pair in the main clause, and one SUBJECT + VERB pair in the subordinate clause (dependent clause). The clauses are connected by subordinating conjunctions (e.g. that, after, when, since, because, if, though, etc.), for example:
I told him that I didn't know anything about their plans.
Betty has worked as a secretary since she moved to California.
If he comes back early, ask him to call me, please.
It's very important to learn basic word order rules and patterns by heart and follow them rigorously and precisely. The files of this section describe standard word order and its peculiarities in different types of English sentences.
A fixed or prototypical word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.
Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.
The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: An overwhelming majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.
Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we know that the language is strict accusative SVO, then we know that Grob smock Blug probably means that Grob is the smocker and Blug the entity smocked. However, since very strict word order is rare in practice, such applications of word order studies are rarely effective.[citation needed]
The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun
· adjective (red house vs house red)
· determiner (this house vs house this)
· numeral (two houses vs houses two)
· possessor (my house vs house my)
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