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The subject receives a privileged status in theories of sentence structure. In those approaches that acknowledge the binary division of the clause into a subject and a predicate (as is the case in most phrase structure grammars ), the subject is usually an immediate dependent of the root node, whereby its sister is the predicate.
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 in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis).
By contrast, in the following sentence the person involved, referred to by a first-person pronoun, is the object rather than the subject. The significance of people as a semantic category takes precedent over the SOV word order tendency, and the person is typically first even in sentences where that person is the object.
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 verb. For example, the German sentence Ich esse oft Rinderbraten (I often eat roast beef) is in the standard SVO word order, with the adverb oft (often) immediately after the verb.
These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object): SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include Japanese , Korean , Mongolian , Turkish , the Indo-Aryan ...
In linguistic typology, the object–subject–verb (OSV) or object–agent–verb (OAV) word order is a structure where the object of a sentence precedes both the subject and the verb. 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 ...
The clause structure with an inverted subject and verb, used to form questions as described above, is also used in certain types of declarative sentences. This occurs mainly when the sentence begins with adverbial or other phrases that are essentially negative or contain words such as only, hardly, etc.:
Kaqchikel's basic structure is VOS, but the language allows for other word orders such as SVO. Since the language is head-marking, a sentence focuses on the subject that is before the verb. A sentence may be either VOS or VSO if switching the subject and the object semantically changes the meaning, but VOS is more common.