Re: [tied] SVO

BTW, Old English was much more flexible in matters of word order than Modern English is and retained many traits of Proto-Germanic syntax. For example, it permitted VSO sentences in a variety of situations (thus regularly after an initial adverbial: "In this way died he"), and SOV with pronominal obects ("I them saw").

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: g-tegle@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 1:33 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] SVO - SOV

--- In cybalist@......, "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote: > SOV was the predominant PIE word-order. Of course there are only six possible permutations of S, V and O, and the three most common ones _by far_ are SVO, SOV and VSO (there is a universal preference for placing the subject before the object). This means, among other things, that chance agreement of word-order types occurs very often. > That is why it is much more interesting to compare the possible word- orders rather than the most common word order between different languages. Ofcourse when saying that both English and Scandinavian have SVO as the most common word order, it doesn't really tell us that much. Even if the Scandinavian languages have the SVO pattern, the word order in these languages have more in common with German system with SOV than English. Some critics might argue that German only partially make use of the SOV pattern (mainly in dependent sentences). I'd say that is wrong since infinite verbals and verbal particles (nearly) always stand last in the sentence. The infinite verb on the contrary preceeds most of its complements (sometimes even the subject) in the main sentence and stand last in dependent sentence. So in my opinion the correct pattern for German is S(V)OV. Håvard

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