5.2: Word Order and Lexical Categories

Word Order and Lexical Categories, from Sarah Harmon

Video Script

Let's talk word order and a little bit more about lexical categories. For the most part, this is not something that Catherine Anderson brings up, but I think it's something that's important to talk about, especially when we compare English with just about any other language.

I found this little comic a while back, and if you are a Star Wars fan, and certainly those who have been watching—whether it's the movies, or the Mandalorian or anything else—you know about how Yoda has a different way of talking. Certainly, if Luke Skywalker says, “Why do you talk backwards all the time?” Luke is showing his perspective; Yoda also has his own perspective: “Backwards talking, I am not. English centric view of grammatical structure, you have.” Not only is it perfect Yoda-ese, as it were, but it also showcases why it's really important to take that step back as linguists, to be objective and just report on and describe.

First of all, let's talk about word order. It's a really important thing; every language has some kind of default word order. In some cases, that's the only possible word order; in other languages, you might be able to play with it a little bit.

When we talk word order, we are focusing on specifically the order of the subject, the object and the verb. We frequently just use those initials: S, O, V. There's a really curious fact about human languages, not just the ones that are being spoken now but anything that we have recorded and deciphered in the human existence.

• 35% of the world languages are SVO languages; that means that their canonical word order their default word order is subject verb object. English certainly falls in this category pretty much every Indo-European language is part of this category, with a couple of exceptions that will get to. Swahili, Thai, Hausa, which is spoken in western Africa, there's so many examples of this.
• 19% of the world languages are VSO languages, and that means the verb is first and then the subject, and then the object. Irish, in fact all of the Celtic languages, are VSO languages, so a little tweak on that VSO. Classical Arabic is, although modern Arabic is not always. Tagalog, as well as all the other Filipino languages and most into most Australio-Pacific languages, are VSO.
• By far and away the most common word order is SOV, subject object verb. Turkish, Japanese, Persian or Farsi (both terms are equal). Farsi, by the way, is an Indo-European language; Hindi tends to be SOV as well.

It's really interesting to note that some 96% of the world's languages actually have the subject before the object in some way. That's an important thing that will come back to when we talk about typology and historical linguistics, but suffice it to say that humans tend to like their subjects before their objects. That makes Yoda-ese a little unique, by the way.

Just as a comparison, let me show you a little bit about English versus Japanese. We'll come back to this when we talk about topology, when we talk about how different word orders affect other elements. You will notice, no doubt that English is an SVO language, that means that we have our subject and then our verb and then our object. SVO languages tend to have prepositions, which is what we do. We tend to be head first, which means that, in a given phrase the head, the crucial piece of that phrase, has to be the first thing there and, if not the very first thing one of the very first things. We tend to rely on word order for a structure; there can be cases of SVO languages that you some sort of case marking, but by and large, not as much.

Japanese is a very traditional SOV language; again, that means the subject, and then the object and then the verb is the overriding structure of a sentence. They tend to be head last, meaning the verb is at the end of the verb phrase. The preposition is not a preposition but a post position because it's at the end of the phrase. An interesting note is that most SOV language is also mark case. Just to remind you, case is a type of inflection that tells you who or what the subject is, who or what the direct object is, who the indirect object is, and the like. Japanese has case marking, as does German and the other Germanic languages, Russian and the other Slavic languages. Latin was a case marketing language and there's so many more examples

As we walk through a little bit more about lexical categories and everything else, just keep in mind that every language has its set of rules, which leads us to the next section, how do you put a phrase together.