[1] In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects,[2] indirect objects,[3] and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology (as in languages such as Latin) or relational nouns (as is typical for members of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).
In the majority of languages with fixed word order, the subject precedes the object.
However, the opposite is true for the very small proportion (approximately 2.9%) of the world's languages that utilize object–subject word order by default.
With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.
Objects are distinguished from subjects in the syntactic trees that represent sentence structure.