Introducing English Linguistics

Total:
402
Frequency information and example languages are taken from Tomlin
(1986: 22, 155–259)
Of the 402 languages he surveyed, Tomlin (1986: 22) found that only five
of these orders actually occurred (an OSV language could not be found).
And of these five possibilities, SOV and SVO orders were overwhelmingly
preferred (in 45% and 42% of the languages examined, respectively); the
other orders were quite uncommon.
English and Japanese provide good examples of SVO and SOV languages,
respectively, because these orders are the most common word orders in
each of these languages. The sentence below is the norm in English
because in a typical English sentence, the subject will come first, followed
by the verb, and then the object:
(6) The child broke the toy.
S
V
O

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However, in Japanese, the same sentence would have a different order,
namely the subject first, followed by the object, and then the verb:
(7) Kodomo
wa
omocha
o
kowashi-ta.
Child
Top
toy
Acc
break-Past
‘The child the toy broke.’
Japanese would additionally contain other markers, such as wa, indicat-
ing that the subject, Kodomo, is the topic (what is being discussed) and an
accusative marker, o, following the object omocha.
The most common criterion for determining word order in a language
is the notion of markedness. Constructions within a language that are
considered common and ordinary are unmarked; those that are rare and
unusual are regarded as marked and typically occur in a specific context.
As an illustration of how markedness applies to word order in English,
consider the two boldfaced clauses at the conclusion of the transcribed
interview below with the musician Bryan Ferry:
Interviewer: Have you ever met Bob Dylan?
Ferry:
Never have, no. Probably never shall.
Interviewer: What if you did a duet with him?
Ferry:
Wouldn’t that be nice? That would be a very good idea. He’s
a friend of Dave Stewart’s, who I know.
Interviewer: Dave played on your album ...
Ferry:
Yeah, Dave and Jools work with lots of different people. Dave
is quite a butterfly and he’s terrific ... very positive energy ...
funny, quite funny, so he gets on with a lot of people. Dylan,