Concept

Verb–object–subject word order

In linguistic typology, a verb–object–subject or verb–object–agent language, which is commonly abbreviated VOS or VOA, is one in which most sentences arrange their elements in that order. That would be the equivalent in English to "Drank cocktail Sam." The relatively rare default word order accounts for only 3% of the world's languages. It is the fourth-most common default word order among the world's languages out of the six. It is a more common default permutation than OVS and OSV but is significantly rarer than SOV (as in Hindi and Japanese), SVO (as in English and Mandarin), and VSO (as in Filipino and Irish). Families in which all or many of their languages are VOS include the following: the Algonquian family (including Ojibwa) the Arawakan family (including Baure and Terêna) the Austronesian family (including Dusun, Malagasy, Toba Batak, Tukang Besi, Palauan, Gilbertese, Fijian and Tsou) the Chumash family (including Inoseño Chumash) the Mayan family (including Huastec, Yucatec, Mopán, Lacondón, Chol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chuj, Tojolabal, Cakchiquel, Tzutujil, Sacapultec, Pocomam, Pocomchí and Kekchi) the Otomanguean family (including Mezquital Otomi and Highland Otomi) the Salishan family (including Coeur d'Alene and Twana) VOS word order is the fourth-most-common of the world's languages, and is considered to have verb-initial word order, like VSO. Very few languages have a fixed VOS word order, most primarily in the Austronesian and Mayan language families. Many verb-initial languages exhibit a flexible word order (such as St’át’imcets, Chamorro, and Tongan), alternating between VOS and VSO. VOS and VSO are usually classified as verb-initial because they share many similar properties, such as the absence of the verb "have" and predicate-initial grammar. Though not as universal, many verb-initial languages also have ergative clauses. For instance, most Mayan languages have an ergative-absolutive system of verb agreement and most Austronesian languages have an ergative-absolutive system of case marking.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb–object–subject_word_order

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related courses (1)

CIVIL-607: Communication for Research Engineers

Communication proficiency is one of the most important results of a good PhD and postdoc experience and it is valued equally in academia and in industry. EPFL PhD students and postdocs are expected to

Related concepts (8)

Subject–object–verb word order

In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam beer drank" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam drank beer" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects.

Object–verb–subject word order

In linguistic typology, object–verb–subject (OVS) or object–verb–agent (OVA) is a rare permutation of word order. OVS denotes the sequence object–verb–subject in unmarked expressions: Oranges ate Sam, Thorns have roses. The passive voice in English may appear to be in the OVS order, but that is not an accurate description. In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the oranges, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the oranges, which are the object of the verb, ate.

Object–subject–verb word order

In linguistic typology, object–subject–verb (OSV) or object–agent–verb (OAV) is a classification of languages, based on whether the structure predominates in pragmatically neutral expressions. An example of this would be "Oranges Sam ate." OSV is rarely used in unmarked sentences, which use a normal word order without emphasis. Most languages that use OSV as their default word order come from the Amazon basin, such as Xavante, Jamamadi, Apurinã, Warao, Kayabí and Nadëb.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb–object–subject_word_order

About this result

Related courses (1)

CIVIL-607: Communication for Research Engineers

Related publications (3)

Text Representation Learning for Low Cost Natural Language Understanding

Jan Frederik Jonas Florian Mai

Natural language processing and other artificial intelligence fields have witnessed impressive progress over the past decade. Although some of this progress is due to algorithmic advances in deep learning, the majority has arguably been enabled by scaling ...

EPFL2023

What is the role of ethics in accreditation guidelines for engineering programmes in Europe?

Helena Kovacs

The Washington Accord emphasises the role of ethical and societal considerations in the practice of engineering. Increasingly, national accrediting bodies are also expecting to see evidence in the delivery and assessment of ethics throughout engineering pr ...

Technische Universität Berlin2021

On the Effect of Word Order on Cross-lingual Sentiment Analysis

Alejandro Ramírez Atrio

Current state-of-the-art models for sentiment analysis make use of word order either explicitly by pre-training on a language modeling objective or implicitly by using recurrent neural networks (RNNS) or convolutional networks (CNNS). This is a problem for ...

2019

Related concepts (8)

Subject–object–verb word order

Object–verb–subject word order

Object–subject–verb word order