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HandWiki. Subject–Verb–Object. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/37158 (accessed on 30 September 2026).
HandWiki. Subject–Verb–Object. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/37158. Accessed September 30, 2026.
HandWiki. "Subject–Verb–Object" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/37158 (accessed September 30, 2026).
HandWiki. (2022, November 29). Subject–Verb–Object. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/37158
HandWiki. "Subject–Verb–Object." Encyclopedia. Web. 29 November, 2022.
Subject–Verb–Object
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In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate oranges." The label often includes ergative languages that do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object (AVO) order. SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 75% of the world's languages. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially "obvious" to human psychology. Languages regarded as SVO include: All Bantu languages, Albanian, Arabic dialects, Assyrian, Bosnian, Bulgarian,[a 1] Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish (but see below), French, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic (with the V2 restriction), Igbo, Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay (Indonesian, Malaysian), Modern Hebrew, Norwegian (with the V2 restriction), Polish, Portuguese, Quiché, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Russian (but see below), Slovene, Spanish, Swedish (with the V2 restriction), Thai and Lao, Ukrainian (but see below), Vietnamese and Yoruba. Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.

subject–verb–object agent–verb–object sentence structure

References

  1. Order of Genitive and Noun http://wals.info/feature/description/86
  2. Donohue, Mark; "Word order in Austronesian from north to south and west to east" in Linguistic Typology 11 (2007); p. 379
  3. Polish, An Essential Grammar by Dana Bielec (Routledge, 2007), p. 272
  4. Hook, P.E.; O.N. Koul. (1996). "Kashmiri as a V-2 language". Word order in Indian languages (Osmania University: Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics): p. 102. ISBN 81-85194-42-4. 
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