[2] Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O).
[3][4][5][6] Subject and object are here understood to be nouns, since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties.
Many synthetic languages such as Arabic,[11] Latin, Greek, Persian, Romanian, Assyrian, Assamese, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, and Basque have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance.
In such an approach, the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section.
However, they are ergative–absolutive languages, and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA (Verb-Object-Absolutive), where the S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb.
Indeed, many languages that some thought had a VOS (Verb-Object-Subject) word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.
His first method, counting languages directly, yielded results similar to Dryer's studies, indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution.
Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity.
Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.
Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten).
[15] In languages such as English and German, word order is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences: A: 'Wen liebt Kate?'
In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify the sentence as a question.
In German, word order can be used as a means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence.
This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent.
However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on the placement of the subject and object(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb[clarification needed]).
On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved).
Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments.
[16] Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Latin, Albanian, and O'odham.
These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged.
Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions explicitly mark the relationships of noun phrases to the other sentence constituents.
In Classical Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations.
[26] Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order.
In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion.
Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, Albanian permits a large variety of word order combinations.
An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution.
[31] Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example: A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic.
Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage ("Did he buy the book?").
[34] This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic, the language of the Christian Church in Egypt.
[37] This has led to some first-language (L1) Spanish speakers using OV word order in more sentences than would be expected.