#word order

Word order in Russian is a crazy thing.

У меня в сумочке пистолет. = I have a gun in my purse.

Пистолет у меня в сумочке. = The gun is in my purse.

The word order completely changes the meaning! The first phrase is what a bank robber would quietly whisper to a teller. The second sounds like a line from Pulp Fiction—imagine Honey Bunny talking to Pumpkin when he asks, "Where is your damn gun?"

I accidentally put the wrong time limit on the original version of this poll, so we're gonna redo it to get a larger sample size!

Grammar! Yay! May as well get some other stuff figured out while I try to sort out round 2 of the vowel selection poll!

The first grammar related thing we have to figure out is word order. For anyone who doesn't remember their grammar unit(s) from school (I only ever had one grammar unit. It was in 9th grade and was only like a week long. But this is public school in the US I'm talking about so that makes sense), the subject of a sentence is generally the thing doing the verb, whereas the object of a sentence is the thing the verb is being done to.

For Example:

Blåhaj ate food.

"Blåhaj" is the subject, "ate" is the verb, and "food" is the object.

As shown above, the word order for English is Subject-Verb-Object, or SVO. Other languages with this word order include French, Spanish, Chinese, and Dutch. About 42% of languages have this word order.

SOV is actually slightly more common, at about 45% of languages, including Latin, Japanese, Hindi, and Ancient Greek.

The third most common word order is VSO, which includes languages like Classical Hebrew and Arabic, Filipino, Irish, and Māori. This is followed by VOS, (which includes languages like Ojibwe, Malagasy, and Yucatec Maya), then OVS, (which includes languages such as Äiwoo, Guarijio, Hixkaryana, and Urarina, as well as the well-known conlang Klingon), then OSV (which as far as I can tell from Wikipedia is only the main word order of a handful of languages in the Amazon).

Sometimes languages deviate from their main word order in certain circumstances, and it can get a little more complicated than just what is described here, but we'll get into most of that stuff later; this is just to figure out the main word order used in most circumstances.

This poll is to create a grammar system for a constructed language made (as much as possible) entirely with tumblr polls! More information on this project can be found here!

Please reblog for larger sample size! Poll #7 (or vowel tournament round 2, depending on whether or not I have time to set it up) should go up in 48 hours!

Japanese relies more on particles than rigid word order to convey meaning, resulting in a flexible structure where the verb is placed at the end, with other elements arranged to emphasize the intended focus.

The Japanese Sentence Structure (April 2021)

Lingthusiasm Episode 66: Word order, we love

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” -- but that’s not the only word order that’s possible. In theory, we could also use other orders, like “Lauren Gretchen visits” or “Visits Gretchen Lauren”, and in fact, many languages do. The only thing that really matters is that for any given language, we all agree on which order means what.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages put words in a particular order. There are many possibilities, but a few of them show up a lot more than others: “I <3 linguistics” (as in English and Indonesian) and “I linguistics <3″ (as in Turkish and Japanese) are the most common word orders for conveying who did what to who. Another common strategy is using some other way of marking the actor and the acted-upon, which frees up word order for other functions, like indicating the topic of the sentence first (and what you want to comment about it afterwards) -- in English, this might be akin to “Linguistics, I <3 it”. We also look at how Yoda maintains his unique approach to word order across a variety of languages, including Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, and Czech.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements: We’re doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing! We’ll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server. Become a patron before the event to live-react in the text chat, and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might include them in the show!

LingComm Grants are back in 2022! These are small grants to help kickstart new projects to communicate linguistics to broader audiences. There will be a $500 Project Grant, and ten Startup Grants of $100 each. Apply here by March 31, 2022 or forward this page to anyone you think might be interested, and if you’d like to help us offer more grants, you can support Lingthusiasm on Patreon or contribute directly. We started these grants because a small amount of seed money would have made a huge difference to us when we were starting out, and we want to help there be more interesting linguistics communication in the world.

If you want to help keep our ongoing lingthusiastic activities going, from the LingComm Grants to regular episodes to fun things like liveshows and Q&As, join us on Patreon! As a reward, you will get over 50 bonus episodes to listen to and access to our Discord server to chat with other linguistics nerds. In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how linguistic research topics come together! We talk about where our own research came from, figuring out spaces for new questions in the existing literature, and bridging gaps between multiple subject areas and communities. Listen here! Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

WALS map of Order of Subject, Object and Verb (SOV, SVO, etc)

All Things Linguistic post on the I <3 NY meme

Inuit Sign Language: a contribution to sign language typology

All Things Linguistic post on Yoda’s syntax in languages other than English

All Things Linguistic post on what baby Yoda’s first words might be

Why we need a gradient approach to word order

@abenitezburraco tweet about gradient approach to word order

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns. Little words, big jobs’

Lingthusiasm episode ‘The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on’

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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and production manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.