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Monday, February 09, 2009

Subject Verb Object

In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. Together with the SOV order, SVO is one of the two most common orders, accounting for more than 75% of the world's languages between them. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology.

Arabic, Finnish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Modern Hebrew, Khmer, Luganda, Russian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Hausa, English, Yoruba, Quiche, GuaranĂ­, Javanese, Malay, Latvian, Rotuman and Indonesian are examples of languages that can follow an SVO pattern. The Romance languages also follow SVO construction, except for certain constructions in many of them in which a pronoun functions as the object. All of the Scandinavian languages follow this order also but change to VSO when asking a question. Some of these languages, such as English, can also use an OSV structure in certain literary styles, such as poetry.

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