Object–verb word order - Misplaced Pages

Languages which place objects before verbs

Linguistic typology
Morphological
Analytic Isolating Synthetic Fusional Agglutinative Polysynthetic Oligosynthetic
Morphosyntactic
Alignment Nominative–accusative Marked nominative Ergative–absolutive Split ergative Symmetrical voice Active–stative Tripartite Nominative–absolutive Direct-inverse Ditransitive/Monotransitive Secundative Indirective Zero-marking Dependent-marking Double-marking Head-marking Null-subject Syntactic pivot Theta role
Word order
VO languages Subject–verb–object Verb–subject–object Verb–object–subject OV languages Subject–object–verb Object–subject–verb Object–verb–subject V1 word order V2 word order OS word order Free word order Time–manner–place Place–manner–time
Lexicon
Color terms Numerals
v t e

In linguistics, an OV language (object–verb language), or a language with object-verb word order, is a language in which the object comes before the verb. OV languages compose approximately forty-seven percent of documented languages.

They are primarily left-branching, or head-final, with heads often found at the end of their phrases, with a resulting tendency to have the adjectives before nouns, to place adpositions after the noun phrases they govern (in other words, to use postpositions), to put relative clauses before their referents, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Of the OV languages that make use of affixes, many predominantly, or even exclusively, as in the case of Turkish, prefer suffixation to prefixation.

For example, English would be considered a VO language, and Japanese and Korean would be considered to be OV.

Japanese:

犬

inu

が

猫

neko

object

を

追いかけた

oikaketa

verb

犬が猫を追いかけた

inu ga neko o oikaketa

{} {} object {} verb

The dog chased (verb) the cat (object)

Korean:

개는

gae-neun

고양이를

go-yang-i-reul

object

쫓았다

jjo-chatt-da

verb

개는 고양이를 쫓았다

gae-neun go-yang-i-reul jjo-chatt-da

{} object verb

The dog chased (verb) the cat (object)

Turkish:

Köpek,

kediyi

object

kovaladı.

verb

Köpek, kediyi kovaladı.

{} object verb

The dog chased (verb) the cat (object)

Some languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish, use both OV and VO constructions, but in other instances, such as Early Middle English, some dialects may use VO and others OV. Languages that contain both OV and VO construction may solidify into one or the other construction. A language that moves the verb or verb phrase more than the object will have surface VO word order, and a language which moves the object more than the verb or verb phrase will have surface OV word order.

Subsets

References

Tomlin, Russell (March 1988). "Basic Word Order: Functional Principles". Language. 64 (1). Linguistic Society of America: 196–197. doi:10.2307/414811. JSTOR 414811.
Dryer, Matthew S. (2013). "Order of Object and Verb". In Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). World Atlas of Language Structures. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved 31 May 2015.
Trips, Carola (2002). From OV to VO in early Middle English: Volume 60 of Linguistik aktuell - Issue 60 of Linguistik Artuell/Linguistics Today Series. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 90-272-2781-0.
Hróarsdóttir, Thorbjörg (2001). Word Order Change in Icelandic: From OV to VO. Philadelphia, PA, USA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 9789027299208.

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