ABSTRACT
English is said to be an SVO language. That is, transitive clauses tend to have the basic order of SUBJECT – VERB – OBJECT. Other languages are the same, but other basic word orders are common: SOV, VSO. (When we say O here, we are also thinking about predicative and adverbial clause elements, which, like the object, typically follow the verb.) Activity A11.1
Think of a language you know well. What is its basic word order?
We should not forget either that there are many other word order rules in English that we have seen throughout this book, for example, the rule that adjectives precede the noun they modify, or that prepositions come first in prepositional phrases (because there are some languages where they come last and are called ‘postpositions’).