What is the role of fixed word order in the english language

FUNCTIONAL PECULIARITIES OF INVERSION IN MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

For the English language it is typical to have a fixed order of words in a sentence, that is, the subject is in the first place, the predicate is in the second. However, there are a number of cases in which this rule can be violated.

Inversion is a change in the conventional word order that serves to express a certain lexical, grammatical or stylistic meaning. In modern English Inversion is a complicated and extensively used phenomenon performing different functions in different contexts and language situations, and that makes it a relevant subject for modern studies.

Grammatical inversion is widely used in the English language, as it is necessary to make interrogative and negative sentences. As a stylistic device, though, inversion is not that ubiquitous, since its use often sounds very literary or formal and is aimed at emphasizing particular parts of the sentence or adding some extra emotional colouring to the utterance.

Grammatical inversion is a structure in which the predicate verb precedes the subject, for instance: “ Never have the taxes been so high in our country.” Structurally two types of grammatical inversion are generally distinguished: full inversion (FI), for example: “ All along one wall climbed a beautiful rambling rose” and “subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI), for example: “…deep blue sky arched high over the moorland. Never, never had Mary dreamed of a sky so blue. In India skies were hot and blazing ” (Burnett F. H., The Secret Garden).

In modern English, grammatical inversion can often be found in magazines and newspapers. It is attributed to the fact that it does not depend on the personal attitude of the speaker and is regulated by the grammar rules of the language. Stylistic inversion serves as a means of enhancing the expressiveness.

From the standpoint of stylistics, the violation of the conventional word order imposes additional semantic shades, highlights or weakens the semantic load of a certain word or word combination in a sentence. It is mostly found in literary discourse – prose and poetry. For example: What a piece of work is a man! (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet 2:2). Due to some psychological factors the extent of text comprehension depends on the sentence structure. So, for the writer it is not enough to convey the meaning, the plot of the book. The writer has to build their utterance so as to shake up and excite the reader’s imagination and feelings. The use of emphatic constructions helps to facilitate and enhance comprehension.

Thus, inversion in the English language is a complex, many-sided phenomenon whose role can vary in different language situations. In general, the majority of native speakers prefer to comply with the traditional word order in spoken language; however, the use of inversion as a stylistic device permits to make one’s speech more expressive, eloquent and diverse. In modern English that use is widely spread in literature and formal written language.

1. Komyagina O.V., Karpova A.V. The use of grammatical inversion in the modern English language. Philological aspect, 2018, no. 6(38), pp. 100-110.

2. Swan Michael. Practical English usage. Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp 270-271

3. Zhiber E. V. Expressive inversion in the English language. Vestnik of Moscow State Linguistic University. Humanities, 220, no. 11 (840), pp. 81-91

WORD ORDER

In English we distinguish between direct and indirect (inverted) word order:

1) direct ― Subject ― Predicate ― Object (declarative sentences);

2) indirect (inversion of some parts for greater emphasis or with a special grammatical or communicative value).

Inversion can be of two types:

― full (when the predicate precedes the subject);

― partial (when only part of the predicate precedes the subject).

Inverted word order fulfils three following functions:

1. Grammatical

Is he at home?

b) in exclamatory sentences which are negative in form but positive in meaning:

Doesn’t she sing beautifully!

c) in conditional clauses introduced asyndetically:

Had he gone to her aid he would only have got himself caught.

d) in adverbial clauses of concession(if the predicative is a noun the article is omitted):

Child though he is, he is completely aware of the situation.

Tired though he was, he continued walking.

e) in the author’s words in direct speech:

«Be quick!», said Pat.

But: “Be quick!”, he said (no inversion when the subject is a pronoun).

f) in stage directions:

Enter Napoleon.

Exit Lady Hummond.

2. Communicative(in order to provide the final position for the rheme, the most important communicative part — this is the so-called end-focus)

a) In sentences with the introductory there, here:

There were not too many people at the zoo.

b) In sentences beginning with adverbial modifiers, often protracted:

At a square table, on a stiff armchair of black wood sat Mr. Johnson.

c) In sentences beginning with so or neither(showing that the remark applies equally to someone or something else):

I like this melodical sound very much. — So do I.

But! We do not use inversion when sois used for emphatic confirmation.

You have stained your blouse with cherry. ― Oh, so I have.

3. Emphatic(to make any part of the sentence prominent by putting it in an unusual position)

In sentences beginning with:

a) negative words never, not,not only, not once, on no condition, on no account, no sooner, under no circumstances:

Never has she spoken with so much confidence.

b) semi-negative time adverbials: seldom, scarcely, hardly, rarely:

Hardly had we entered the house when the storm began.

c) words of restrictive meaning: well, many, little:

Little do they know about her.

Well do I remember her.

d) after only +time expression:

Only then did they realize their mistake.

Only when she came home did she realize that she had lost her purse.

But: Only Mary knows the answer (no inversion here).

e) words like so and such followed by that:

So dangerous did the weather become, that all the flights were cancelled.

Note: The inversion is partial here!

f) in sentences beginning with a predicative, adverbial modifier of manner or a postposition.

Tall and graceful was Jim.

Up flew the plane.

But: Up it flew.

Functions of word order in English and types of inversion

Communicative structure of the sentence.

Communicative structure of the sentence refers to the way the speaker structures the information, the way he identifies the relative importance of utterance parts. Usually the utterance consists of 2 parts:

— the topic of discussion: something about which a statement is made (theme = topic)

— the new information, which adds most to the process of communication (rheme = comment).

Some sentences contain only the rheme, they are monorhematic: It is getting dark. In the majority of sentences the constituents are either rhematic or thematic. There are also transitional elements. Sentences containing the theme and the rheme are called dirhematic.

Means of preserving the progressive information structure:

1) passive transformations,

2) the use of conversives,

3) the use of the personal subject and the nominal predicate.

Means of making the subject rhematic:

1) the constructions there is/there are, it is necessary,

Thematic elements contribute little to the meaning of the utterance as they reflect what has already been communicated: they have the lowest degree of communicative dynamism (CD). Rhematic elements, containing new information which advances the communicative process have the highest degree of CD.

Words in an English sentence are arranged in a certain order, which is fixed for every type of the sentence, and is therefore meaningful. Modern English is characterized by a rigid word-order in accordance with which the subject of declarative sentences, as a rule, precedes the predicate. This is the so-called direct order of words.

An unusual position of any part of the sentence may be treated as inversion in the broad sense of the word. There is 2 structural types of inversion: full (predicate + subject) and partial (auxiliary verb (operator) + subject + notional part).

The main functions of word order.

1. Grammatical function expresses grammatical relations. PetersawJohn.

Cases of inversion:

Full inversionmarks the second part of a sentence of proportional agreement (not obligatory) The more he thought of it, the less clear was the matter.

Partial inversion is used

— to distinguish types of sentences: questions, exclamations or imperative sentences having the form of a negative question. Is it really true? Don’t you do it!

— to indicate subordination in conditional and concessive clauses introduced asyndetically. Were she asked, she would say.

2. Communicative function indicates information focus (end-focus)

Cases of inversion:

Full inversion is used

— after introductory there. There was a girt whom he loved, there goes our bus.

— after fronted adverbial expressions of place (direction). Here comes Edward.

Partial inversion is used

— after as, than, so. She was well-read as were most of her friends.

3. Emphatic function makes part of the sentence prominent by placing the rheme before the theme.

Cases of inversion:

Full inversion is used

— after fronted postpositions (adverbs or prepositions). I stopped the car and up walked a policeman.

— after fronted predicatives. Tall and graceful was Ann.

Partial inversion is used

— after fronted negative and/or restrictive adverbs or expressions: hardly, seldom, rarefy, little, never, expression with only. Only after we met her, did we realize how clever she was.

— after adverbs, adverbial phrases or clauses (often of manner). Well do I remember the day.

— after as, than, so: So shocked was he that he hardly said a word.

— after fronted objects, especially Not /No + Object. Not a single word did she say.

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Does English have a fairly fixed word order? [closed]

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English has a fairly fixed word order. Is that sentence true or false?

2 Answers 2

Well the word «fairly» isn’t really sufficiently well-defined to answer that. That said, I think it’s safe to say that word order does have importance in English. In particular, in comparative terms I reckon, based on my albeit very limited knowledge, that:

Word order in English is more important compared with many other languages.

On the other hand, I’ll note that:

English word order is more important compared with many other languages.

Then again, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that:

Compared with many other languages, word order is more important in English.

So, it depends on the sentence in question. As Yoda might say: Important order is. But many exceptions there are. Yesssss.

I upvoted tkp’s excellent answer, but your comment to that answer indicates to me that your question is based on a misconception.

Few things in language are absolute.

The importance of word order varies among languages. Compared to Latin, word order in English is much more fixed. Compared to French, word order in English is about equally flexible.

Those two sentences have completely different meanings, and the difference is determined solely by the order of the words.

In more complex sentences, word order is more flexible. if you want to be understood, however, my advice is to place the subject before the verb in indicative clauses. But you have your choice about placing an adverb before the verb modified or after the direct object.

This all goes back to the vagueness of “fairly” in your question. Word order is important in English but not absolutely fixed.

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are the constituent order of a clause—the relative order of subject, object, and verb; the order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun phrase; and the order of adverbials.

Some languages have relatively restrictive word orders, often relying on the order of constituents to convey important grammatical information. Others, often those that convey grammatical information through inflection, allow more flexibility which can be used to encode pragmatic information such as topicalisation or focus. Most languages however have some preferred word order which is used most frequently. [ 1 ]

For most nominative–accusative languages which have a major word class of nouns and clauses which include subject and object, constituent word order is commonly defined in terms of the finite verb (V) and its arguments, the subject (S) and object (O). [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]

There are six theoretically possible basic word orders for the transitive sentence: subject–verb–object (SVO), subject–object–verb (SOV), verb–subject–object (VSO), verb–object–subject (VOS), object–subject–verb (OSV) and object–verb–subject (OVS). The overwhelming majority of the world’s languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with VOS being slightly more common than OSV, and OVS being significantly more rare than the two preceding orders. [ 6 ]

Contents

Finding the basic constituent order

It is not always easy to find the basic word order of S, O and V. First, not all languages make use of the categories of subject and object. In others, the subject and object may not form a clause with the verb. If subject and object can be identified within a clause, the problem can arise that different orders prevail in different contexts. For instance, French has SVO for nouns, but SOV when pronouns are involved; German has verb-medial order in main clauses, but verb-final order in subordinate clauses. In other languages the word order of transitive and intransitive clauses may not correspond. In still others, the rules for ordering S, O, and V may exist, but be secondary to (and often overruled by) more fundamental ordering rules—e.g., for considerations such as topic–comment. To have a valid base for comparison, the basic word order is defined [ by whom? ] as:

While the first two of these requirements are relatively easy to respect, the latter two are more difficult. In spoken language, there are hardly ever two full nouns in a clause; the norm is for the clause to have at most one noun, the other arguments being pronouns. [ citation needed ] In written language, this is somewhat different, but that is of no help when investigating oral languages. Finally, the notion of «pragmatically neutral» is difficult to test. While the English sentence «The king, they killed.» has a heavy emphasis on king, in other languages, that order (OSV) might not carry a significantly higher emphasis than another order.

If all the requirements above are met, it still sometimes turns out that languages do not seem to prefer any particular word order. The last resort is text counts, but even then, some languages must be analyzed as having two (or even more) word orders.

Constituent word orders

These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use «I» as the subject, «see» as the verb, and «him» as the object):

Sometimes patterns are more complex: German, Dutch and Frisian have SOV in subordinates, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.

Others, such as Latin, Romanian and Finnish, have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses. [ citation needed ] Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol ‘S’ being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and ‘A’ for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. (‘O’ for object may be replaced with ‘P’ for ‘patient’ as well.) Thus Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. Such an approach allows the description of word order to be more easily extended to languages which do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For example, the Mayan languages have been described with the rather uncommon VOS word order. However, they are ergative–absolutive languages, and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb. Indeed, many languages claimed to have a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.

Functions of constituent word order

A fixed or prototypical word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian. [ 1 ]

Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.

The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: An overwhelming majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders. [ 7 ]

Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we know that the language is strict accusative SVO, then we know that Grob smock Blug probably means that Grob is the smocker and Blug the entity smocked. However, since very strict word order is rare in practice, such applications of word order studies are rarely effective. [ citation needed ]

Phrase word orders and branching

The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun.

Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides).

There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For SVO languages, either order is common.

For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after their heads, such as «extraordinaire», which kept its position when it was borrowed from French.)

Pragmatic word order

Some languages do not have a fixed word order. In these languages there is often a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments; however there are also languages in which word order is fixed even though the degree of marking would enable free word order, and languages with free word order, such as some varieties of Datooga, which have free word order combined with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments. Typologically there is a trend that highly animate actors are more likely to be topical than low-animate undergoers, this trend would come through even in free-word-order languages giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS in the case of ergative systems, however ergative systems do not usually extend to the highest levels of animacy, usually giving way to some form of nominative system at least in the pronominal system). [ 8 ] Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders such as Latin, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Croatian, Russian (in intransitive clauses), and Finnish. In some of those, a canonical order can still be identified, but in others this is not possible. [ citation needed ]

Hungarian

In Hungarian, the enclitic -t marks the direct object. For «Kate ate a piece of cake«, the possibilities are:

Portuguese

In Portuguese, the clitic pronouns allow many different orders:

Other issues

In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions. However, most languages are generally assumed to have a basic word order, called the unmarked word order; other, marked word orders can then be used to emphasize a sentence element, to indicate modality (such as an interrogative modality), or for other purposes.

For example, English is SVO (subject-verb-object), as in «I don’t know that», but OSV is also possible: «That I don’t know.» This process is called topic-fronting (or topicalization) and is common. In English, OSV is a marked word order because it emphasises the object, and is often accompanied by a change in intonation.

An example of OSV being used for emphasis:

A: I can’t see Alice. (SVO) B: What about Bill? A: Bill I can see. (OSV, rather than I can see Bill, SVO)

Non-standard word orders are also found in poetry in English, particularly archaic or romantic terms – as the wedding phrase “With this ring, I thee wed” (SOV) or “Thee I love” (OSV) – as well as in many other languages.

Translation

Differences in word order complicate translation and language education – in addition to changing the individual words, the order must also be changed. This can be simplified by first translating the individual words, then reordering the sentence, as in interlinear gloss, or by reordering the words prior to translation, as in English-Ordered Japanese. See reordered languages for further examples.