# Reason for changing order?



## raptor

Hello,

I'm wondering if there are examples of languages that have changed their order, eg SVO-VSO, or even NOUN-ADJ to ADJ-NOUN? If so, what would the reasons behind these changes be?

Sorry if this is outside the forum's scope.

Thanks!

EDIT: I just read about how (Old) English changed from SOV to SVO, but was that more because of influence via Normans or French?


----------



## ThomasK

The only thing I feel about this, is that SVO (and A) is more logical to me, although standard Dutch is an SVO-language, I believe, although it is SVAOV when there are two verbs, aux. and main verb (A being an Adjunct of time, other or place). 

Yet: in spoken language we often place adjuncts outside the SVOV-part in Dutch: SVOVA. Not as SVVOA as in English.


----------



## Hulalessar

ThomasK said:


> The only thing I feel about this, is that SVO (and A) is more logical to me


 
I do not think logic comes into it. To say that SVO is logical suggests that the logical order is _agent - verb - patient_. But that only refers to active sentences. In English a passive sentence has the order _patient - verb - agent_.

_The cat chased the dog_

and 

_The dog was chased by the cat_

both convey the same information and neither is more "logical" than the other.


----------



## ThomasK

I quite agree, but isn't passive clearly a secondary 'voice'?. Passive is very uncommon in my dialect for example. 

And even then putting subject first and having it followed by the verb and then the object and adjuncts is what we commonly do because we concentrate on the event (in SVO) and only add the adjuncts afterwards, as I notice in my dialect and in everydayspeech as well, even in Dutch: we often add the time/ place/... adjunct only afterwards. So I mean: I think in a lot of languages (but I do not know any non-European languages), one starts with the subject and then adds VO, which seems 'natural' (better than logical), as there is a focus first; details come later... 

I have not done linguistics at a scientific level in the last few years though. Don't hesitate to correct.


----------



## entangledbank

The 'logic' to order is only that OS is extremely rare; the three orders VSO, SVO, SOV are about equally common in the world's languages (VSO a little less so, I think). I can't think of any clear examples of order change in documented languages, except that Old French was V2 like German and Dutch. But the Celtic languages are VSO, and Proto-Indo-European was basically SOV, so there's a significant change: not in recorded texts, unfortunately.


----------



## ThomasK

Or shall we turn it around and say that SVO/ SOV are fairly 'natural' therefore ? 

(BY the way: if Dutch has the SVOV* (S V/Aux O V*) structure, with V* being the main verb, do you call it SVO or SOV then? By the way: in subclauses it is SOV all the way. So: SOV simply ?)


----------



## Joannes

entangledbank said:


> The 'logic' to order is only that OS is extremely rare; the three orders VSO, SVO, SOV are about equally common in the world's languages (VSO a little less so, I think).


Much less so, actually, have a look at this map from WALS (maps 82 and 83 are of interest too).



ThomasK said:


> (BY the way: if Dutch has the SVOV* (S V/Aux O V*) structure, with V* being the main verb, do you call it SVO or SOV then? By the way: in subclauses it is SOV all the way. So: SOV simply ?)


In a generativist framework, SOV would be preferred as the 'underlying structure' because of simpler rules (and a generalizing V2-rule). Take a look at Bennis (2000) p. 72 ff. and Koster 1974.

@raptor: I don't know much about word order stuff (let alone in history), but if you're really interested, apparently Charles Li published on the matter (just google his name + word worder).


----------



## sokol

There is no word order which is "more logical"; one can only claim that a certain word order is "more natural".
Generative linguists do this based on statistics, so for this you could use the WALS database.

But mere statistics is also tricky because it involves the question of what should be counted as a language and what not. (Should Chinese languages count as "one" language or as many? How many German and Arabic languages are there - only one, or more? What about extinct languages, shouldn't they be included too, those of which we have a description? And what about those extinct ones of which we don't have a description? And so on.)

Still I think it is save to say that SO is more natural than OS; the position of the verb however is more or less arbitrary (well, WALS statitics seems to indicate that VSO is "less natural" - but then, that's only statistics again).

"Naturalness" of word order, to get back to the original topic, might be relevant to word order changes. When English lost most of its declension a fixed word order became more important, else there might be ambiguities. One could expect that the "most natural" word order would be chosen (but even then, this might depend on the language structure, thus needn't be universal but could be specific for a certain language or language family).
*
If* it were possible to prove that SVO would be "more natural" then the change of word order in English could be explained by this; but to find proof beyond doubt will be a very difficult task.

Languages with rich declension paradigms or pre/suffixes determining the syntactic category always have a rather free word order - even when they prefer a specific word order (which usually is the case).
I guess in Old English word order was relatively free (like it still is in German), and the loss of declension just made a choice of word order necessary: so here's the explanation *why,* in the case of English certainly the loss of declension played a role.
As for the *how *I can't give a good answer.


----------



## ThomasK

Good points, sure. But I really wonder whether every day speech with declension sounded that more different than EDS without declension. When I translate from German I sometimes find a dative ahead of the sentence. Does that happen in EDS ? 

Not very often, I think. Or does it? (I see you are a native speaker of German)


----------



## Erick404

And there's Latin, which (as far as I know) was believed to be SOV when spoken, and featured a huge variation on word order when written.
As the loss of declension made word order necessary, all romance languages became SVO (though other word orders are possible sometimes or even the only option in certain circumstances).


----------



## sokol

ThomasK said:


> Good points, sure. But I really wonder whether every day speech with declension sounded that more different than EDS without declension. When I translate from German I sometimes find a dative ahead of the sentence. Does that happen in EDS ?


Please explain what EDS is (because I haven't the faintest) and I'll try to answer your question.


----------



## Christo Tamarin

raptor said:


> I'm wondering if there are examples of languages that have changed their order, eg SVO-VSO, or even NOUN-ADJ to ADJ-NOUN? If so, what would the reasons behind these changes be?


I would like to mention Polish: unlike the other Slavic languages (with ADJ-NOUN order), Polish has NOUN-ADJ. In more details, Polish has ADJ2-NOUN-ADJ1.


----------



## ThomasK

EDS : everyday speech, sorry ! 

Adjectives: the most interesting point is: if they change, do they change in a particular, 'more natural' ;-) way?


----------



## palomnik

Sorry to be joining the discussion at this point, but the best example of this sort of change is probably Arabic; literary/classical Arabic is decidedly VSO, whereas as far as I know all the modern dialects are SVO.

I sometimes wonder if the linguistic distinction of SVO/VSO/SOV is sometimes overplayed; it doesn't really fit most East Asian languages very well at all, since most languages here (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and I think Korean) differentiate between the topic of the sentence and the subject, the topic being the first element, regardless of its function in the sentence.


----------



## ThomasK

Interesting point: the topic comes first. BTW: are there subject functions in the sentence in Ch, Jap, Thai, Kor ? Do those terms make sense there ???


----------



## sokol

ThomasK said:


> When I translate from German I sometimes find a dative ahead of the sentence. Does that happen in everyday speech?


Yes it does; quite frequently. ("Mir geht es gut." Uttered a million times a day.)

In German we certainly do prefer some types of word order - but word order still is free to a degree, and for emphasis we also use such rearrangements of words. However, German word order looks rather "fixed" compared to Latin - it only looks "free-ish" compared to English.

About Topic-First-structure: the same is true for sign language, but sign language syntax is difficult to describe in "classical" terms. See for that this article on ASL; and for those who can read German, this one on DGS. (I don't speak sign language - I only know a tiny little bit about it. )
For DGS, a "kind of" SOV structure is suggested as the most typical one. The problem however is that in sign languages some signs could be simultanuous - and that, it seems, the "word order" in sign language also is free to a degree.

Concerning Polish, I wonder wether the change of adjective-subjective word order could be due to French influence: after all Polish nobility (then about 5% of the population, so a significant number), at some point in history, allegedly spoke better French than Polish.


----------



## entangledbank

The word order notations only refer to the primary, default order. English has object - subject - verb order when the object is topicalized, but this is marked compared to the default SVO.

In Japanese, topicalization is the rule rather than the exception. The subject (usually) or object or something else is put in front position. It is comparatively rare that you have non-topicalized subject and object together in a clause: but I believe when you do they adhere to the fairly strict SOV order of Japanese.


----------



## ThomasK

BUt SOV : verb at the end ? . To me this verb- at- the- end construction is - I hesitate - non-natural, as generally the predicate (yes ?) contains a topic and an activity performed by the subject, as central elements... In our main clauses in Dutch there is at least some verb (be it an auxiliary) after the subject. 

I am sorry to somehow insist on this naturalness, but I wonder to what extent there is some (predictable) naturalness in 'natural' languages...;-)


----------



## palomnik

ThomasK said:


> Interesting point: the topic comes first. BTW: are there subject functions in the sentence in Ch, Jap, Thai, Kor ? Do those terms make sense there ???



Yes, it does make sense to talk of the subject as opposed to the topic.  In Japanese, the two are set off by different postpositions.  In Chinese and Thai they are identified by their position in the sentence (I really know no Korean, so I can't comment on it).

Which is the tricky part!  In about 75% of situations, the topic and the subject will coincide, which can lead the learner into a false sense of security that the two are always identical, and that SVO applies (or in the case of Japanese, SOV), but it doesn't always follow.

Of course, in all three languages the subject is frequently omitted, especially when it is a personal pronoun.


----------



## Hulalessar

ThomasK said:


> BUt SOV : verb at the end ? . To me this verb- at- the- end construction is - I hesitate - non-natural, as generally the predicate (yes ?) contains a topic and an activity performed by the subject, as central elements... In our main clauses in Dutch there is at least some verb (be it an auxiliary) after the subject.
> 
> I am sorry to somehow insist on this naturalness, but I wonder to what extent there is some (predictable) naturalness in 'natural' languages...;-)


 
I think there is some "naturalness" in subject preceding object; this reflects the presumbably universal belief that causes precede effects. The fact that languages where object precedes subject are rare would on the one hand seem to confirm it, but also to undermine it.

Whilst a language where the object precedes the subject may seem odd and counter-intuitive, I think the brain copes with it because, although speech is necessarily uttered over time, it processes language in small packets, speech typically coming in small packets rather than with the complex coordination that may be found in writing.

But, as I suggested above, all this only seems to apply to transitive sentences. If we replace "subject" by "agent" and "object" by "patient" then, at least for English, the proposition that the agent must precede the patient does not hold true.

If we have "a chasing", "a cat doing the chasing" and "a dog being chased", this can be expressed in English in two different ways:

_The cat chased the dog_

and 

_The dog was chased by the cat_

This shows that the object of a transitive (active) verb and the subject of an intransitive (passive) verb are equivalent, but the equivalence must be expressed by a change in word order. We cannot say:

_*By the cat was chased the dog_

When a speaker uses the passive voice, the listener has no problem establishing that it is the dog that is being chased, even though in the utterance "dog" precedes " cat". One can imagine that a speaker of a language with no passive voice is as likely to find this as odd as a speaker of a language where the subject must precede the object finds a language where the object must precede the subject.

So, I think that what one finds "natural" is to a very great extent influenced by ones mother tongue.


----------



## sokol

Hulalessar said:


> So, I think that what one finds "natural" is to a very great extent influenced by ones mother tongue.


I subscribe to this statement. 
(As far as syntax is concerned obviously; in phonology it is different, some principles of naturalness are well established already in phonetics and phonology.)

Compare also what possibilities declension offers when comparing English with German:

_The cat chased the dog.  _SVO
_ Die Katze jagte den Hund. _ SVO
_Den Hund jagte die Katze.  _OVS but *marked* (object emphasised)_
The dog was chased by the cat_.  SVO
_By the cat was chased the dog. _
_Der Hund ist von der Katze gejagt worden. _ S(V)OV
_Von der Katze ist der Hund gejagt worden.__ _ O(V)SV but *marked* (object emphasised)
Note please that OVS and O(V)SV in German is not at all exclusively written nor formal spoken language only, we also use this (and quite frequently) in everyday speech to emphasise the object.

If for any reason OVS would become the *unmarked *version of word order in German (I cannot imagine one, but lets be creative and assume that a dictator with a speech deficiency - he uses OVS only - would decree that only OVS should be used in school and at court ...) - if this would happen then German could indeed become an OVS language - or OSV, depending on your views how to parse the "then" O(V)SV structures.

But this is not how linguistics works, unfortunately predictions on language developments rarely come true. 
It is much safer to try and explain word order changes which actually happened.


----------



## ThomasK

palomnik said:


> Yes, it does make sense to talk of the subject as opposed to the topic. In Japanese, the two are set off by different postpositions. In Chinese and Thai they are identified by their position in the sentence (I really know no Korean, so I can't comment on it).


 
Could you illustrate your point in Japanese? Is there any congruence subject-verb --- and is that the basis of the subject concept in Japanese ?


----------



## entangledbank

Japanese has two case particles/affixes:

_Kodomo-ga terebi-o mi-ta_.
child-NOM television-ACC watch-PAST
The child watched television.

In a main clause one of these would be marked instead as topic, with a different particle/affix replacing the case marker:

_Kodomo-wa terebi-o mi-ta_.
child-TOP television-ACC watch-PAST
The child watched television.

_Terebi-wa kodomo-ga mi-ta_.
television-TOP child-NOM watch-PAST
It was television the child watched.

Now I'm straying beyond the Japanese I can produce off the top of my head, but I believe that if this was a subordinate clause you'd use both subject _ga_ and object _o_, and some actant in the matrix clause would be topic.

Cross-linguistically subjects are also identifiable by some other syntactic properties. Two subjects can be coordinated. In some languages only subjects can be relativized. If there's agreement with the verb, it always includes subject agreement.


----------



## Lugubert

To add to the confusion, in Swedish you could say "En björn sköt en jägare idag". Literally, A bear shot a hunter today. But with at least spoken intonation and appropriate context, you would understand that the topicalization means that you would have expected the hunter to kill a hare or deer or moose, but not a bear.



			
				entangledbank said:
			
		

> In some languages only subjects can be relativized. If there's agreement with the verb, it always includes subject agreement.


Possibly. But there are languages that inflect verbs for direct object agreement. I don't know how much they care for subjects.

And then there's the question, if a language dramatically changes its word order, is it still the same language? Sanskrit was fairly free in word order, probably because of the inflection system(s). Hindi has all (and sometimes lots of) verbs at the very end of sentences. Reasons? Bla bla simplification bla bla Prakrit Apabhramsha bla bla. HELP!


----------



## sokol

Lugubert said:


> And then there's the question, if a language dramatically changes its word order, is it still the same language?


No it isn't, would be my answer. 
And usually we do use different names for those languages (Sanskrit and Hindi, Old English and (Modern) English, and so on.


Lugubert said:


> Sanskrit was fairly free in word order, probably because of the inflection system(s). Hindi has all (and sometimes lots of) verbs at the very end of sentences. Reasons? Bla bla simplification bla bla Prakrit Apabhramsha bla bla. HELP!


How scary. 
Well I guess there was also loss of *some *inflection in Hindi? (Sorry, but I don't know any Hindi at all.) If so then it would be logical to more or less fix word order (to restrict free choice of word order to a degree if not necessarily fix it like in English ;-): and fixing word order indeed is achieved by moving all verbs to the end of a sentence.

In my opinion if there wasn't any loss of inflection in Hindi it would be difficult to explain why word order should be restricted like that ... thus my suggestion.


----------



## Lugubert

sokol said:


> Well I guess there was also loss of *some *inflection in Hindi?


A massive loss. With the exception of a few vocatives, nouns use two cases only. In Sanskrit (and its contemporary vernaculars, the true ancestors of Hindi etc.) there were eight.

A nice thing about Hindi is that the six irregular verbs are fairly regular too, but in slightly different way than the regular regular ones.


----------



## entangledbank

Lugubert said:


> But there are languages that inflect verbs for direct object agreement. I don't know how much they care for subjects.


 
My understanding is that they all do - this is a universal. If verbs agree with objects, they also agree with subjects. The only ones I'm familiar with are Bantu languages; so I'm vaguely remembering the universal from some book or paper.

I thought of Hindi this morning in connexion with this thread: it's also ergative, which is a pretty major typological change from PIE and Sanskrit.


----------



## Flaminius

entangledbank said:


> Japanese has two case particles/affixes:


I wonder why _-ga_ and _-o_ are set aside from other postpositions as case particles.  



> Now I'm straying beyond the Japanese I can produce off the top of my head, but I believe that if this was a subordinate clause you'd use both subject _ga_ and object _o_, and some actant in the matrix clause would be topic.


 The unmarked word order in the subordinate clause is indeed SOV.
_Haha-wa watashi-ga terebi-o mi-ta koto-ni kizui-ta_.
mother-TOP I-NOM television-ACC watch-PAST COMP-ni realise-PAST
Mother realised that I watched television.
The verb _kizuku_ requires the content of the realisation to be marked by _-ni_.


----------



## sokol

Lugubert said:


> A massive loss. With the exception of a few vocatives, nouns use two cases only. In Sanskrit (and its contemporary vernaculars, the true ancestors of Hindi etc.) there were eight.


That's good news then as it shows that predictions *might *yet be possible.  (But I probably only was lucky there.)

Compare also Romance languages: their syntax also became more or less fixed, compared to the free variation allowed in Latin.


----------



## ThomasK

Lugubert said:


> The topicalization means that you would have expected the hunter to kill a hare or deer or moose, but not a bear.


 
Is this relevant (as one needs to specify the context so well or about anyone would misread it)? I mean: this does not deny that it is basically SVO, I think. I think those marked topicalizations only confirm the rule...

Different languages: if I lose hair, grow fatter (too fat), walk slower, am I not still JanG? ;-)

Subjects: what in the end is the definition of subject ??? I only know agreement verb/object in French (_je l'ai trouvée_), and even then is that very important. Or are we referring to something else ? 

Does Japanese have cases (like nom.)? DO they refer to subjects and to topicalization (to me topicalization is pragmatics, subjects grammatical rather)??? 

_(Sorry if I am mistaken about some things !)_


----------



## Hulalessar

I think it may be the case that those of us used to languages with nominative-accusative alignment see things differently from those used to languages with ergative-absolutive alignment. Concentrating too much on transitive verbs, we are apt to associate "subject" with "agent". The subject of a sentence is marked either by its position or by a nominative case ending and the same marking is used irrespective of whether the sentence is transitive or intransitive (whether active or passive). In an ergative language the object of a transitive verb and the subject of a intransitive verb are marked in the same way. Since I am not the speaker of an ergative language I cannot say for certain, but I suspect that the speakers of ergative langauges do not so readily associate the idea of "subject" with "agent".


----------



## Taversham

sokol said:


> Compare also what possibilities declension offers when comparing English with German:
> 
> _The cat chased the dog.  _SVO
> _ Die Katze jagte den Hund. _ SVO
> _Den Hund jagte die Katze.  _OVS but *marked* (object emphasised)_
> The dog was chased by the cat_.  SVO
> _By the cat was chased the dog. _
> _Der Hund ist von der Katze gejagt worden. _ S(V)OV
> _Von der Katze ist der Hund gejagt worden.__ _ O(V)SV but *marked* (object emphasised)
> Note please that OVS and O(V)SV in German is not at all exclusively written nor formal spoken language only, we also use this (and quite frequently) in everyday speech to emphasise the object.



In the passive at least there are other options in English too though, because the positions of the verb(s) is less fixed.

_The dog was__ chased__ by the cat._ SVO
_By the cat the dog __was__ chased__._ OSV but *marked* (object emphasised)
_The dog by the cat __was__ chased__._ SOV
_The dog __was__ by the cat __chased__._ S(V)OV although that might require careful intonation and/or specific context to sound natural.
And possibly even
_By the cat __was__ the dog __chased__._ O(V)SV would work for me in a poetic context at least, and maybe without, depending on to what it's in response. (E.g., a situation where you're having to emphasise both that it was the cat chasing the dog and that the dog was being chased at all. Maybe if someone said "The dog was not chased. And not by the rabbit." and you were trying to correct them on both counts. Or something.)

I think the latter two would only arise in speech (and then, infrequently) and would generally need some commas or italics for clarity if written, but feel far from Yoda-y to me, and could be quite natural in context (as opposed to "Chased by the cat the dog was." or "By the cat was chased the dog." which I can't imagine anyone ever saying, even though they have no ambiguity). Then, I suppose the preposition 'by' effectively acts as declining the noun in such a sentence, and in the simpler sentence with no such indicator the order is very fixed. (Although I imagine that would also be true in German were one of the nouns not masculine. If the cat were chasing the mouse, for example?)

So I suppose my point is the freeness of word order has other factors then declension, even if that's a/the main one.

(Erm, and I apologise for there being so many brackets in this post.)


----------



## entangledbank

ThomasK said:


> Subjects: what in the end is the definition of subject ??? I only know agreement verb/object in French (_je l'ai trouvée_), and even then is that very important. Or are we referring to something else ?


 
I refer you to the paragraph at the bottom of my post #23. There are a number of properties that can be used to identify subjects. (No _one_ property alone will do.) In various languages, various of them hold. In virtually all languages some combination of them is enough to identify something as _subject_ in terms of its _syntactic_ properties (word order, agreement, coordination, relativization etc.) - i.e. not referring to its meaning, nor to its pragmatic prominence.



ThomasK said:


> Does Japanese have cases (like nom.)? DO they refer to subjects and to topicalization (to me topicalization is pragmatics, subjects grammatical rather)???


 
See examples of Japanese above. The syllables attached to the words can be regarded as case suffixes or postpositions - because of how Japanese word order works, it is practically impossible to decide whether they're separate words or not. The topic marker _wa_ is used in almost every Japanese sentence, and the topic precedes any remaining words that are subject, object etc.


----------



## J.F. de TROYES

Erick404 said:


> And there's Latin, which (as far as I know) was believed to be SOV when spoken, and featured a huge variation on word order when written.
> As the loss of declension made word order necessary, all romance languages became SVO (though other word orders are possible sometimes or even the only option in certain circumstances).


 
Generally speaking languages are more flexible when spoken than in their written form. The SOV order is undoubtedly prominent in Latin, but , as you point it out, other structures coexisted and verbs can be found in the middle of a sentence in the most famous Classical authors. However statistical studies showed that SVO is rare in Caesar, more usual in Petronius and is getting common in Late Latin from the early 5th century. If these statistics are right, I suppose such a difference between both writers is more due to their style than age and Petronius'style is more casual than Caesar's and closer to  the spoken language So the Latin syntax allowed to use the SVO order which did'nt suddendly arise in Romance languages, but results from trends slowly acting on the evolution of Latin. The question to be asked is not why the SOV order shifts into an SVO when the Romance languages arise, but why a minority trend in Latin becomes a usual structure in its daughter-languages.
In the same prospect the loss of declensions begins in spoken language in the 1st.century A.D. ( maybe earlier ) . Due to stressed penultimate syllables or antepenults, final syllables have been weakened and _arborem _was pronounced exactly the same as _arbor_. Later the _-i_ and _-e_ ; the _-es_ and _-is_ ; the _-um_ and _-o_ endings have been less and less differenciated. This process may have given more importance to the word order.
Of course that doesn't mean at all I am denying any externan influence on changing syntaxic structures in a language.


----------



## Hulalessar

In Spanish the order V(O)S is not unusual when the order SV(O) would result in S being separated from V (and O where present) by too many words, e.g.

_Construyó el muro el hombre que vive en la casa vecina_

Literally: constructed the wall the man who lives in the neighbouring house.

In subordinate clauses the verb does not often come at the end, e.g.

_Este es el muro que construyó el vecino._

Literally: This is the wall which constructed the neighbour.


----------



## Gavril

Taversham said:


> In the passive at least there are other options in English too though, because the positions of the verb(s) is less fixed.
> 
> _The dog was__ chased__ by the cat._ SVO
> _By the cat the dog __was__ chased__._ OSV but *marked* (object emphasised)
> _The dog by the cat __was__ chased__._ SOV
> _The dog __was__ by the cat __chased__._ S(V)OV although that might require careful intonation and/or specific context to sound natural.
> And possibly even
> _By the cat __was__ the dog __chased__._ O(V)SV would work for me in a poetic context at least, and maybe without, depending on to what it's in response. (E.g., a situation where you're having to emphasise both that it was the cat chasing the dog and that the dog was being chased at all. Maybe if someone said "The dog was not chased. And not by the rabbit." and you were trying to correct them on both counts. Or something.)
> 
> I think the latter two would only arise in speech (and then, infrequently) and would generally need some commas or italics for clarity if written, but feel far from Yoda-y to me, and could be quite natural in context



In what contexts, out of curiosity? I would never expect to hear any of sentences 2-5 above in a non-poetic setting.


----------



## Meyer Wolfsheim

I'm afraid I am far from qualified to make any dignified comments on an area such as this, but if anything, I feel that most obviously a word order would have to change if a language became simplified or underwent any major grammatical changes (in our terms, losing an archaic/primitive system of inflections), as is the case for English.  However, on terms of 'naturalness', I don't really think any word order should feel more 'natural' than the other, unless of course your mother languages favor that word order, which is of course being biased.  As for the whole adj-noun or noun-adj, I feel that noun-adj is more natural (even though my L1 is English).


----------



## Malti

Gavril said:


> In what contexts, out of curiosity? I would never expect to hear any of sentences 2-5 above in a non-poetic setting.



(Sorry to bump an old thread.)

I think it's slightly hard to think of contexts because, in whatever order, it's not a sentence you'd often say anyway. But re: 2, moving the object to the beginning of the sentence is pretty standard in spoken English for emphasis or exception. Things like "That, I like." or "Her, I can understand." i.e., as opposed to the other person who you can't understand. So "By the cat, the dog was chased." seems valid enough, although I guess the comma is important. 4, would probably work better if written as "The dog was, by the cat, chased." or "The dog was - by the cat - chased." or "The dog was (by the cat) chased.", so it's actually only a SV sentence with an afterthought O stuck in. The same could be applied to 3, "The dog - by the cat - was chased.". Not sure about 5 though, that's fairly poetic. Not least because how would you say it without making the "was the dog chased" bit sound like a question?


----------



## Meyer Wolfsheim

sokol said:


> I subscribe to this statement.
> (As far as syntax is concerned obviously; in phonology it is different, some principles of naturalness are well established already in phonetics and phonology.)
> 
> Compare also what possibilities declension offers when comparing English with German:
> 
> _The cat chased the dog.  _SVO
> _Die Katze jagte den Hund. _ SVO
> _Den Hund jagte die Katze.  _OVS but *marked* (object emphasised)
> _The dog was chased by the cat_.  SVO
> _By the cat was chased the dog.  _While to a native this would sound wrong and be declared incorrect by formal language, grammatically the entire sentence can be understood clearly.  Of course, most deviations from standard word order are, in English, used for poetic forms or to create a certain style/effect.
> _Der Hund ist von der Katze gejagt worden. _ S(V)OV
> _Von der Katze ist der Hund gejagt worden.__ _ O(V)SV but *marked* (object emphasised)
> Note please that OVS and O(V)SV in German is not at all exclusively written nor formal spoken language only, we also use this (and quite frequently) in everyday speech to emphasise the object.
> 
> If for any reason OVS would become the *unmarked *version of word order in German (I cannot imagine one, but lets be creative and assume that a dictator with a speech deficiency - he uses OVS only - would decree that only OVS should be used in school and at court ...) - if this would happen then German could indeed become an OVS language - or OSV, depending on your views how to parse the "then" O(V)SV structures.
> 
> But this is not how linguistics works, unfortunately predictions on language developments rarely come true.
> It is much safer to try and explain word order changes which actually happened.


 
Predictions on language developments I believe can be accurately predicted if a group of people can influence/control the grammar/vocab used by every day people, such as your example of a dictator.  This notion has been of course thought of before; such as George Orwell's 1984 where the regime is slowly getting rid of English in favor of Newspeak.  Non-intereference of course makes it difficult but I think that there could be a trend.  

Language does not change on the whims of people (an animal did not evolve to fly because it tried hard/wanted to) but rather changes to suit the needs of its speakers.  Obviously then there is a connection with word order to what needs to be conveyed most importantly.  

A language may begin to be losing power in expressing something or already have an ambiguity, so the speakers start to emphasize what they are trying to get across by placing those elements in different positions, most likely in the front of the sentence.  

This is all just theory, but I believe historically there are some examples, such as the development of the definite articles in the Romance languages when Latin had none.


----------



## berndf

Meyer Wolfsheim said:


> A language may begin to be losing power in expressing something or already have an ambiguity, so the speakers start to emphasize what they are trying to get across by placing those elements in different positions, most likely in the front of the sentence.


I am not sure I understand properly what your point is. But if anything needs to be explained here it is not why German uses word order for emphasis marking (this is very frequent in IE languages) but why English lost it. The answer to this is quite obvious: The loss of the declension system made it impractical to maintain flexible word order because it caused too many ambiguities:
_The dog saw the man._ (SVO)
_The dog saw the man._ (OVS)
are indistinguishable in English while in German they are:
_Der Hund sah den Mann._ (SVO)
_Den Hund sah der Mann._ (OVS)


----------



## Gavril

Malti said:


> (Sorry to bump an old thread.)
> 
> I think it's slightly hard to think of contexts because, in whatever order, it's not a sentence you'd often say anyway. But re: 2, moving the object to the beginning of the sentence is pretty standard in spoken English for emphasis or exception. Things like "That, I like." or "Her, I can understand." i.e., as opposed to the other person who you can't understand. So "By the cat, the dog was chased." seems valid enough, although I guess the comma is important.



Since writing the post you responded to, I've realized that fronting of objects is more common than I thought. But, it still seems fairly restricted; regardless, "by [x]" is not the object of the sentences above. Have you ever heard or said a (non-poetic) sentence with "by [X]", followed by a passive clause?



> 4, would probably work better if written as "The dog was, by the cat, chased." or "The dog was - by the cat - chased." or "The dog was (by the cat) chased.", so it's actually only a SV sentence with an afterthought O stuck in. The same could be applied to 3, "The dog - by the cat - was chased.".


As above, I would ask, where have you heard/seen sentences of this type before (besides the hyphenated sentence)? The hyphenated sentence sounds normal, but it sounds like someone modifying his/her sentence in the middle of saying it, rather than uttering a "pre-formulated" sentence.


----------



## Meyer Wolfsheim

berndf said:


> I am not sure I understand properly what your point is. But if anything needs to be explained here it is not why German uses word order for emphasis marking (this is very frequent in IE languages) but why English lost it. The answer to this is quite obvious: The loss of the declension system made it impractical to maintain flexible word order because it caused too many ambiguities:
> _The dog saw the man._ (SVO)
> _The dog saw the man._ (OVS)
> are indistinguishable in English while in German they are:
> _Der Hund sah den Mann._ (SVO)
> _Den Hund sah der Mann._ (OVS)


 

What I mean is that some languages have trouble expressing certain concepts which were never needed by their native speakers but suddenly the need arises, so a proportional change in the language has to take place for it to remain. Isn't there a language in Brazil which doesn't have a counting system? 

However, the English sentence can be done both ways:

The dog saw the man=Normal pronounciation=It is the dog that saw the man. 

The dog, saw the man=It is the man that saw the dog. 

The ambiguity can be cleared up by placing emphasis on certain parts or evening using a pause.

edit:

In fact, you can complete remove the ambiguity by actively using case to mark the object and subject:

The dog, saw he the man vs The dog, saw him, the man.


----------



## Malti

Gavril said:


> Since writing the post you responded to, I've realized that fronting of objects is more common than I thought. But, it still seems fairly restricted; regardless, "by [x]" is not the object of the sentences above. Have you ever heard or said a (non-poetic) sentence with "by [X]", followed by a passive clause?



I will confess it's not something I usually look out for, and nor is it exactly easily googleable. If the only limit is that it start with "by X" then there will be fairly regular occurrences of sentences starting "By 1938, X" and similar. But I suspect that is not what you mean. "By falling ratings and fan gripes, Heroes has been driven to a top level shake up with co-exec producers Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander losing their jobs." is the only example I can find right now.



Gavril said:


> As above, I would ask, where have you heard/seen sentences of this type before (besides the hyphenated sentence)? The hyphenated sentence sounds normal, but it sounds like someone modifying his/her sentence in the middle of saying it, rather than uttering a "pre-formulated" sentence.



Well, just any sentence with a parenthetic clause, surely?


----------



## Gavril

Malti said:


> Well, just any sentence with a parenthetic clause, surely?



There's more than one kind of parenthetic clause, as your earlier examples show: 



> "The dog was, by the cat, chased." or "The dog was - by the cat - chased." or "The dog was (by the cat) chased."



Only the middle example sounds normal to me. Have you ever heard the other two types of sentences, in which the phrase "by [X]" is inserted non-abruptly between the _be-_verb and the participle?


----------



## Malti

Gavril said:


> There's more than one kind of parenthetic clause, as your earlier examples show:
> Only the middle example sounds normal to me. Have you ever heard the other two types of sentences, in which the phrase "by [X]" is inserted non-abruptly between the _be-_verb and the participle?



I may well be being incredibly stupid, but I would have read the one with the commas and the one with the hyphens in exactly the same way. I would consider neither more or less abrupt than the other. Nor do I think I could specifically hear if someone were speaking with brackets. But whether I have or haven't heard it I'm not sure I could tell you because it wouldn't be something I'd especially notice if someone had used it. It wouldn't jump out at me as being a particularly odd word order, certainly.

But '[sentences] in which the phrase "by [X]" is inserted non-abruptly between the _be-_verb and the participle' is getting into a very specific scenario anyway, when all I was really trying to do was agree with the original poster that English isn't just entirely limited to SVO-order.


----------



## Gavril

Malti said:


> I may well be being incredibly stupid, but I would have read the one with the commas and the one with the hyphens in exactly the same way. I would consider neither more or less abrupt than the other. Nor do I think I could specifically hear if someone were speaking with brackets.



Brackets "sound" about the same to me as commas.



> But whether I have or haven't heard it I'm not sure I could tell you because it wouldn't be something I'd especially notice if someone had used it. It wouldn't jump out at me as being a particularly odd word order, certainly.
> 
> But '[sentences] in which the phrase "by [X]" is inserted non-abruptly between the _be-_verb and the participle' is getting into a very specific scenario anyway,


Regardless, I'd be interested to know if anyone comes across an example of this sentence type.


----------



## missmillies

Classical Latin was SOV, whereas the Romance languages are SVO. Classical Arabic was VSO, whereas Modern Arabic is SVO. Old English was SOV (in subordinate clauses) and almost always SVO in Modern English. 

So my question is how and why does this happen?

My own thoughts are that as cases are lost and the nominative and accusative merge, it's easier to distintinguish the subject from the object if they're separated by the verb. All the above languages became SVO as they lost their cases. 

So thoughts.


----------



## sokol

Mod note:
Merged with an existing thread.


----------



## Encolpius

raptor said:


> Hello,
> 
> I'm wondering if there are examples of languages that have changed their order, eg SVO-VSO, or even NOUN-ADJ to ADJ-NOUN? If so, what would the reasons behind these changes be?...



I am not a linguist, but if I am not mistaken Finnish has changed its ancient Finno-Ugric word order from SOV (we still use that in Hungarian) to SVO as a result of Germanic influence.


----------

