Word Order

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Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

Word order refers to the linear relation of words and phrases within larger units. An important distinction in word order studies is that between rigid and variable, or free, word order. Rigid word order means that a change in the order of elements within a phrase changes the syntactic function and the semantic interpretation of these elements, e.g. That man sleeps vs man that sleeps; Philip sees Caroline vs Caroline sees Philip. Variable (or free) word order means that linear rearrangements do not trigger such grammatical changes, e.g. Philip I saw vs I saw Philip. Although many languages exhibit considerable word order variation, it is commonly acknowledged that no genuine free word order language exists. Therefore, word order studies are carried out in terms of linearization patterns that are commonly referred to as ‘basic (or dominant, unmarked, natural) word order.’ This term captures the fact that there are word order preferences, rather than strict word order rules in terms of the grammatical status of the elements involved. With regard to the major constituents of the clause ( syntactic function) the term ‘basic order’ is typically identified with the order that occurs in stylistically neutral, independent, indicative clauses with full noun phrase (NP) participants, where the subject is a definite human agent, the object is a definite non-human patient and the verb represents an action, not a state or a process ( process vs action). Since basic order refers to preferences pertaining to markedness, another criterion for basic order is its statistical dominance in texts (for problems with this criterion, see Siewierska 1988). The fact that basic order is stylistically (e.g. pragmatically) neutral can be tested by trying to use the relevant expression as an answer to different questions. By this heuristic criterion Philip I saw is established as a marked (or non-basic) order for English, because it cannot be an answer to a question such as What’s new?, Who saw Philip?, or What did you do?

Word order studies have produced different rules for basic or rigid order, among which universals of basic order are of special interest. The characteristic of word order which is most often discussed is the relative order of S(ubject), O(bject), and V(erb). In most of the world’s languages, S almost always precedes O, so that of the six possible orderings of S, O, and V, the most common patterns are SOV (e.g. Turkish, Japanese), SVO (e.g. English, French), and VSO (e.g. Irish, Maori) (see Greenberg 1963; Mallinson and Blake 1981; Hawkins 1983; Tomlin 1986). The basic order of the major constituents of the clause correlates with the basic order of minor elements, such as that of noun and attribute, adposition and its complement, complementizer and the rest of the embedded sentence. The universal principle underlying these correlations is that the head of a phrase tends to be placed at the same side of the phrase, preferably at its periphery (see Greenberg 1963; Vennemann 1974, 1976; Hawkins 1983, 1990). This principle explains the fact that in head-final languages the basic order is SOV, complementpostposition, sentence-complementizer, attribute-noun (e.g. Japanese, Turkish). In head-initial languages the order of these elements is reversed (e.g. Irish, Maori). The fact that rather few languages adhere to this principle consistently for all phrases is explained by language change, language contact, or other intervening factors (see Vennemann 1974). As to pragmatic word order rules, two competing universal preferences have been postulated: the theme of an utterance tends to precede the rheme ( functional sentence perspective, theme vs rheme); the reverse principle that most important and thus rhematic information precedes thematic information was put forward by Givón (1983, 1988); (for a critique of both assumptions, see Primus 1993: Hawkins 1994). It is generally agreed, that a sentence topic tends to precede the comment ( topic vs comment; Gundel 1988; Primus 1993). A ‘stylistic’ universal ordering preference which is based on language performance (see Hawkins 1990, 1994) is the weight principle.

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