Discover

In linguistic typology, 'Subject Object Verb' (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, then "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence.

Contents

Incidence

Properties

Examples

See also

Incidence

Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by Subject Verb Object; the two types account for more than 75% of natural languages with a preferred order). ^[1]
The SOV languages include Armenian, Turkic languages, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Ainu, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Itelmen, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Burushaski, Basque, Latin, Bengali, Burmese, Tibetan, Amharic, Tigrinya, Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, Avar, Kabardian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Navajo, Hopi, Aymara, Quechua, Pāli, Nepali, Sinhalese and most other Indian languages.
German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" or, "I say something about Karl", is in SVO word order. When a conjuction like "daß", which corresponds to "that" (when it is used as a conjunction) in English, is used; the verb of the subject is moved to the end of the sentence, rendering the word order SOV. A possible such sentence is "Ich sage, daß Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat", or, translated into English word-for-word, "I say that Karl a belt bought has", hence, SOV word order. However, this only applies to certain conjunctions. French, Spanish and Italian are SVO, but use SOV when a pronoun is used as the (direct or indirect) object: e.g., "''Sam a mangé des oranges''", or "''Sam comió naranjas''" or "''Sam ha mangiato delle arance''" (Sam ate oranges) would become "''Sam les a mangées''", 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.
Although Russian usually employs the SVO structure in transitive сlauses, like, for instance, "''я копаю яму''" (I'm digging a hole), Russian, like other Slavic languages, does not place strict rules on the order of words in a sentence; its being an inflected language helps make clear the object of the clause (in this case via the accusative case). Thus, there are several different ways the clause can be said, whose subject can even be dropped since the verb's conjugation makes it obvious who or what the subject is. "''Яму копаю''" is one way of saying it differently; the clause may also be said as "''копаю яму я''." The meaning remains the same, yet the context may change.

Properties

SOV 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, to place a name before a title or honorific ("James Uncle" and "Johnson Doctor" rather than "Uncle James" and "Doctor Johnson"), and to have subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses. Relative clauses preceding the nouns to which they refer usually signals SOV word order, though the reverse does not hold: SOV 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'' (が) and ''o'' (を) or the Korean ''i/ga'' (이/가) and ''eul/reul'' (을/를). SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases. Within Eurasia SOV languages often (but not always, e.g. not ordinarily in Persian) place adjectives before the nouns they modify, and this is often cited as a universal tendency of SOV languages; however, outside Eurasia SOV languages usually place adjectives after the modified noun.

Examples

An example in Japanese:

Sentence	私は箱を開けます。
Words	私	は	箱	を	開けます。
Romaji	watashi	wa	hako	o	akemasu.
Gloss	I	(tpc)	box	(obj)	open
Parts	Subject		Object		Verb
Translation	I open the box.

The markers は (wa) and を (o) are, respectively, topic and object markers for the words that precede them. Technically, the sentence can be translated a number of ways ("a box", "the boxes", etc), but this does not affect the SOV analysis.
Although Latin is an inflected language, the most usual word order is SOV. For example:

Sentence	Servus puellam amat
Words	Servus	puellam	amat
Gloss	Slave (nom)	girl (acc)	loves
Parts	Subject	Object	Verb
Translation	The slave loves the girl.

Again, there are multiple valid translations ("a slave", etc) that do not affect the overall analysis.

See also

★ Topic-prominent language

★ Subject Verb Object

★ Object Subject Verb

★ Object Verb Subject

★ Verb Object Subject

★ Verb Subject Object