[1] [2] 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.
[3] Of the OV languages that make use of affixes, many predominantly, or even exclusively, as in the case of Turkish, prefer suffixation to prefixation.
犬inu がga 猫nekoobjectをo 追いかけたoikaketaverb犬 が 猫 を 追いかけたinu ga neko o oikaketa{} {} object {} verbThe dog chased (verb) the cat (object)개는gae-neun 고양이를go-yang-i-reulobject쫓았다jjo-chatt-daverb개는 고양이를 쫓았다gae-neun go-yang-i-reul jjo-chatt-da{} object verbThe dog chased (verb) the cat (object)Köpek, kediyiobjectkovaladı.verbKöpek, kediyi kovaladı.
{} object verbThe dog chased (verb) the cat (object)Some languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish, use both OV and VO constructions,[4] but in other instances, such as Early Middle English, some dialects may use VO and others OV.
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.