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In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest.
Tamil being a strongly head-final language, the basic word-order is SOV. However, since it is highly inflected, word order is flexible and is used for pragmatic purposes. That is, fronting a word in a sentence adds emphasis on it; for instance, a VSO order would indicate greater emphasis on the verb, the action, than on the subject or the object.
Category: Languages by word order. ... Subject–verb–object languages (10 C, 118 P) V. Verb-second languages (17 P) Verb–object–subject languages (2 C, 20 P)
Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate apples." SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV.
In languages with V2 word order, such as most Germanic languages except for Modern English, as well as Ingush and Oʼodham, the verb is always the second element in a main clause. The subject precedes the verb by default, but if another word or phrase is put at the front of the clause, the subject is moved to the position immediately after the ...
Although this word order is rarely found as the default in most languages, it does occur as the unmarked or neutral order in a few Amazonian languages, including Xavante and Apurinã. In many other languages, OSV can be used in marked sentences to convey emphasis or focus, often as a stylistic device rather than a normative structure.
VOS word order is the fourth-most-common of the world's languages, [1] and is considered to have verb-initial word order, like VSO. Very few languages have a fixed VOS word order, most primarily in the Austronesian and Mayan language families. [3] Many verb-initial languages exhibit a flexible word order (such as St’át’imcets, Chamorro ...
In the last example, it is highly unlikely that fish is the subject and so that word order can be used. In some languages, auxiliary rules of word order can provide enough disambiguation for an emphatic use of OVS. For example, declarative statements in Danish are ordinarily SVnO, with "n" being is the position of negating or modal adverbs ...