INTRODUCTION
There
is a long tradition in linguistics that treats the basic word order of the
subject, object, and verb as a fundamental typological parameter, that treats
the question of whether a language is SOY, SYO, YSO, YOS, OYS, or OSY as one
the most important things to know about a language. The term basic word order
is used in various ways by different linguists, often without an apparent
awareness that it is being applied to different notions. The characterization
of basic word order by Hawkins (1983) is representative of criteria assumed by
many linguists: he uses a set of different criteria, all of which tend to
correlate with each other, though none of them are necessary properties. These
include the most frequent order, the order that occurs in the broadest set of
syntactic environments, and the order that is unmarked by a variety of other
markedness criteria. But apart from the description of particular languages,
the notion of basic word order has played its most significant role in
identifying the orders of various pairs or sets of elements that provide the
empirical basis for the crosslinguistic generalizations originally discussed by
Greenberg (1963) and pursued in works by various people (e.g. Lehmann 1973,
Vennemann 1976, Hawkins 1983, Dryer 1992). Whatever the merits of the various
criteria discussed by Hawkins, the fact remains that the empirical basis for
these generalizations has largely been statements in grammatical descriptions
which describe one order of some pair or set of elements as the normal order or
the most common order. In other words, while criteria other than frequency may
typically correlate with the most frequent word order, a large body of
descriptive literature provides statements regarding the apparent relative
frequency of different orders, but very little evidence regarding other
criteria, excepting that for many languages, like English, one order is so
clearly basic by all criteria that no questions arise.
GREENBERG’S
THEORY
Greenberg
was not explicit as to his criteria for assigning a basic order to a language,
but it appears that he was motivated primarily by that language’s canonical
order. For example, his first universal appealed to declarative sentences with
nominal subject and object (1963:77) and he classified German and Chinese as
SVO, the most frequent order in those languages in main clause declaratives,
despite the facts that those languages also manifest SOV order.
Many of the typological
generalization in the greenberg paper wee based on correlations with these six
basic orders, thought the rarity of languages in which the object precedes the
subject prevented him from saying much about other typological mproperties of
languages with these three orderings. So, for example, he showed that three are
robust correlations between basic word order and whwther a language has
prepositions, as in table 1.
Table 1 Correlations
between word order and
Adopsition
order (Greenberg 1963)
|
|
VSO
|
SVO
|
SOV
|
|
Preposition
|
6
|
10
|
0
|
|
postposition
|
0
|
3
|
11
|
Most
typologists since Greenberg have, continued to assume the six-way typology and
to base it primarily on canonical orde. A typical examples is Tomlin (1986).
This work attempted to calculate the percentages of each language in terms of
basic (that is canonical) order and went on to propose functional explanations
for the statistical break-down (table 2).
Table
2 Proportions of basic con-
stituency
orders (Tomlin 1986)
|
Word order
|
Languages
|
|
|
Number
|
%
|
|
|
SOV
|
180
|
45
|
|
SVO
|
168
|
42
|
|
VSO
|
37
|
9
|
|
VOS
|
12
|
3
|
|
OVS
|
5
|
1
|
|
OSV
|
0
|
0
|
|
Total
|
402
|
|
Given
the apparent usefulness of the notion ‘canonical word order’, one might assume
that most uttered sentences in most languages would be canonical. Such is
emphatically not the case, however. It has been demonstrated that in the spoken
language, sentences with a subject, a verb and an object, where the two
arguments are full lexical items, are a minority in all languages and a tiny
minority inmany languages. Rather, what one finds is what Du Bois (1985) calls
‘Preferred Arguments Structure’, namely a verb with one full argument, which is
typically either the subject of an intransitive verb or the object of a
transitive verb.
Consider
even English, which is not a null-subject language and is widely considered to
be rigdly SVO. A corpus of 20,794 senteces from 2400 telephone converations
between unacquainted adults included only 5975 ( 29 per cent ) that were SVO.
The
usefulness of canonical order over Preferred Argument Structure for typological
purposes can be appreciated by a look at two languages in which object pronouns
and full object NPs are in complementary distribution – French and Chichewa. In
those language, pronouns precede the main verb, lexical Nps follow it. Given
that pronoun-V sequences are more frequent in discourse than V-full NP
sequences, one might be tempted to predict that French and Chichewa would
manifest OV typological correlations. Such is not the case however; both
languages are robustly VO in their correlations. (Willems, Defrancq, Colleman,
Noel : 2003).
EXAMPLES
- VSO.
Examples of languages with VSO word
order include Semitic languages (including Arabic, Classical Hebrew, and Ge'ez
(Classical Ethiopic)), and Celtic languages (including Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton), and many Mesoamerican languages.
Example
of Arabic : يقرأ المدرس الكتا (yaqraʼu l-mudarrisu l-kitāba). Verb-Subject-Object.
- SVO.
Languages regarded as SVO include Berber, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, Italian, Portuguese, Quiche, Romanian, Rotuman, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Vietnamese, Yoruba and Zulu.
Example
of English : She loves him. Subject-Verb-Object.
- SOV.
This pattern is used by Adyghe and Basque.
Example
of Basque : Enekok sagarra ekarri
du. Subject-Object-Verb.
- VOS.
Commonly cited examples include Austronesian languages (such as Malagasy, Old Javanese, Toba Batak and Fijian) and Mayan languages (such as Tzotzil).
- OSV. OSV is used by Korean, Japanese, Arabic, atc.
Example of Japanese : 그사과는 내가 먹었어요 . Object-Subject-Verb.
- OVS. This pattern is used by Turkish, Dannish,
Finnish, etc.
Example of Turkish : Bardağı kırdı John. Object-Verb-Subject.
CONCLUSION
In linguistics, word order typology is
the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how
different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders
found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word
orders that are of interest are the constituent
order of a clause – the
relative order of subject, object, and verb; the order of modifiers
(adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun
phrase; and the order of adverbials.
Some
languages use relatively restrictive word order, often relying on the order of
constituents to convey important grammatical information. Others—often those
that convey grammatical information through inflection—allow more flexibility,
which can be used to encode pragmatic information such as topicalisation or focus. Most languages, however,
have a preferred word order.
Most nominative–accusative languages—which
have a major word class of nouns and clauses that include subject and
object—define constituent word order in terms of the finite verb (V) and its arguments, the subject (S), and object (O).
There
are six theoretically possible basic word orders for the transitive sentence:
subject–verb–object (SVO), subject–object–verb (SOV), verb–subject–object
(VSO), verb–object–subject (VOS), object–subject–verb (OSV) and
object–verb–subject (OVS). The overwhelming majority of the world's languages
are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using
VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with
VOS being slightly more common than OSV, and OVS being significantly more rare
than the two preceding orders. These six-way classification were developed by
Joseph H. Greenberg.
REFERENCES
Dryer, Matthew S. 1989. Discourse-governed word order and word order
typology. Belgian Journal of Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Du
Bois, John W. 1987. The Discourse Basis
of Ergativity. Language 63: 805-855.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular
reference to the order of meaningful elements. Cambridge. Mass: MIT Press.
Hawkins,
John A. 1983. Word order universals.
New York: Academic Press.
Lehm Dryer, MatthewS. 1983. Coos word order. Paper delivered at the
Western Conference on Language. Eugene: Oregon.
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1973. A structural principle of language and its
implications. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Tomlin,
Russell. 1986. Basic Word Order:
Functional Principles. London: Croom Helm.
Vennemann, Theo. 1976. Categorial grammar and the order of
meaningful elements. In: Juilland, A. (ed).
Saratoga, California: Anma Libri.
Willems, Dominique., Defrancq, Bart.,
Colleman, Timothy., Noel, Dirk. 2003. Contrastive
Analysis in Languange. Palgrave: New York.
Winfred
P. 1978. The great underlying
ground-plans. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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