ABSTRACT
Word order and syntactic structure are closely interrelated. It could be said that the word order of a language merely follows from, is the sum of, the orders of all relevant syntactic constructions. Then word order would be a derivative notion. A word order change would simply mean that a number of syntactic constructions had begun to manifest themselves differently. However, since it is usually possible to state rules or tendencies of word order in such a general way that they apply to a wide range of syntactic patterns, it is more common to regard the overall word order rules as having priority over individual constructions. A pioneering cross-linguistic study listed the basic word order of thirty languages in terms of the relative order of just three elements: subject (S), verb (V) and object (O). Labelling the position of the finite verb has proved useful in dealing with the history of English word order.
