The parameter
Basic word order asks a narrow question with wide consequences. In a plain declarative clause with a full noun subject and a full noun object, what sequence do subject, object and verb take. Six orders are logically possible, all six are attested, and they are not attested in anything like equal numbers.
The question is narrower than the label suggests. It concerns transitive clauses with full nouns rather than pronouns, the neutral order rather than the orders available under emphasis, and dominance rather than exclusivity. A language can permit several orders and still have a dominant one; it can also permit several with none dominant, and that is a value in its own right rather than a failure of classification.
That matters more to a European translator than the classification of any distant language. In his WALS chapter on the order of subject, object and verb, Matthew Dryer treats German and Dutch as lacking a dominant order: main clauses without an auxiliary are verb-medial, while subordinate clauses and clauses with an auxiliary are verb-final. Calling German an SVO language is a simplification that fails at exactly the point where a translator needs it, the long subordinate clause with the verb parked at the end.
How languages vary
- SOV: the verb closes the clause. Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Hindi-Urdu, Persian, Basque, Amharic.
- SVO: the verb stands between its two arguments. English, French, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Swahili, Indonesian.
- VSO: the verb opens the clause. Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Standard Arabic in its verbal sentence type.
- VOS: Malagasy, Fijian.
- OVS: rare; Hixkaryana of northern Brazil is the standard example.
- OSV: rarest of all, reported for a few Amazonian languages.
- No dominant order: German, Dutch, and many languages whose case marking frees the order for pragmatic use.
Dryer's chapter 81 gives, for a sample of 1,376 languages: 564 SOV, 488 SVO, 95 VSO, 25 VOS, 11 OVS, 4 OSV and 189 lacking a dominant order. Verb-final and verb-medial together account for more than three quarters of the sample, and the two object-initial types together account for fifteen languages. The sample is built to be genealogically balanced, so the figures count languages rather than speakers.
Consequences for translation
The verb tells a reader what kind of event is being reported and which participant is doing what, and word order decides when the reader receives it. Out of a verb-final language, the shape of the clause is not known until its last word; into one, the target clause cannot be assembled until the source has been read through. Work on such a pair proceeds sentence by sentence rather than phrase by phrase.
The reconfiguration is a structure shift and is not optional: no arrangement of English words reproduces a Turkish clause-final verb. Where the source clause has to be cut in two, or two merged into one, the change belongs under clause structure change.
Three practical points follow. Long subordinate chains are rebuilt rather than followed: a German clause that withholds the finite verb until after a stack of adjuncts has to be reordered wholesale, and the negation travels with it. Reordering also carries emphasis, because restoring canonical target order moves what stood first in the source into the middle of the target sentence; the structure shift is compulsory, the emphasis change riding on it is not, and only the second is a decision. And order is not an error category: what a reviser should log is not reordering but scope, since a qualifier at the end of a source enumeration may attach to the whole list or to its last member, and target order will often force one reading.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Mahkeme, davacının 12 Mart tarihinde sunduğu dilekçeyi reddetti.
- Target: The court rejected the petition submitted by the claimant on 12 March.
- Comment: The Turkish verb arrives last, after a relative clause that itself ends in a participle. English delivers the verb second and pushes the modification right, inverting the reading order.
DE>EN
- Source: ..., dass der Beklagte den Vertrag trotz mehrfacher Mahnung nicht unterschrieben hat.
- Target: ... that the defendant has not signed the contract despite repeated reminders.
- Comment: German subordination sends the finite verb to the end and splits the verb group. English keeps the group together after the subject, so the last German words surface in the middle of the English clause. The label SVO describes only the German main clause.
JA>EN
- Source: 田中さんは昨日会議で新しい計画を発表しました。
- Target: Mr Tanaka announced the new plan at the meeting yesterday.
- Comment: Japanese orders time, place and object before a clause-final verb; English places the verb second and reverses the adjuncts after the object. The sentence is assembled from its end backwards.
References
- Dryer, M. S. (2013). "Order of Subject, Object and Verb." In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Ch. 81. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Greenberg, J. H. (1963). "Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements." In Greenberg, J. H. (ed.), Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 73–113.
- Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Ch. 4.
- Velupillai, V. (2012). An Introduction to Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 9.