Word order

Although the notion of word order in principle applies to all constituents in a clause, in practice the investigation of word order in a given language usually starts from the identification of the order of the constituents bearing the grammatical function of subject and object with respect to the verb. Languages of the world vary a lot as far as word order is concerned. Some languages are quite strict, so it is easy to identify a word order as the basic one. English is a good example. In the following sentences, the noun phrase that precedes the verb is interpreted as the agent, while the noun phrase that follows the verb is interpreted as the theme. a. A teacher saw John b. John saw a teacher If a verb obligatorily takes both an agent and a theme, the agent will be the subject and the theme will the object. So the English sentences above provide evidence that the basic word order of English is S(ubject)-V(erb)-(O)bject. However, even in rigid word order languages like English the word order can be affected. For example, in the following sentence, where the object a teacher is contrastively focused [Pragmatics- Section 4.1], the word order becomes OSV. A TEACHER John saw Other languages have a much more flexible word order than English, though. In fact, most sign languages studied up to now seem to belong to this group. For these languages, even the identification of the basic word order can be a challenge, so it is important to be clear on the very notion of basic word order.