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unusual facts about Word order


Word order

Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and MorphologyBernard Comrie (1981) – this is the authoritative introduction to word order and related subjects.


Gujarati grammar

The grammar of the Gujarati language is the study of the word order, case marking, verb conjugation, and other morphological and syntactic structures of the Gujarati language, an Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian state of Gujarat and spoken by the Gujarati people.

Mbula language

Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.


see also

Japanese grammar

The modern theory of constituent order ("word order"), usually attributed to Joseph Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrase.

Middle East Media Research Institute

Brian Whitaker, a Middle East editor for the Guardian newspaper (UK) later pointed out that the word order in Arabic is not the same as in English: "the verb comes first and so a sentence in Arabic which literally says 'Are shooting at us the Jews' means 'The Jews are shooting at us'".

Murrinh-patha language

Linguistic Typology concerns word order, and in Murinh-patha sentences are ordered subject-object-verb.

Proto-Human language

In a 2003 paper, Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen argued that the ancestral language had subject–object–verb (SOV) word order.

Sanskrit grammar

Frits Staal, Word order in Sanskrit and Universal Grammar, Foundations of Language, supplementary series 5, Springer (1967), ISBN 978-90-277-0549-5.

Verb–object–subject

Among languages with true subjects, in Hadza the word order VOS is extremely common, but is not the default, which is VSO.