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In linguistics, word order typology is 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 sub-domains 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 use relatively restrictive word order, 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 a preferred word order.〔Comrie, 1981〕 Most nominative–accusative languages—which have a major word class of nouns and clauses that include subject and object—define constituent word order in terms of the finite verb (V) and its arguments, the subject (S), and object (O).〔Hengeveld, Kees (1992). ''Non-verbal predication''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.〕〔Jan Rijkhoff (2007) "Word Classes" ''Language and Linguistics Compass'' 1 (6) , 709–726 〕〔Rijkhoff, Jan (2004), "The Noun Phrase", Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-926964-5 〕 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.〔Russel S.Tomlin;1986;Basic word order: Functional principles;London:Croom Helm〕 == Finding the basic constituent of word order and mode of transmission== A paper by Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen, building on work in comparative linguistics, asserts that the distribution of word order types in the world’s languages was originally SOV. The paper compares a survey of 2135 languages with a "presumed phylogenetic tree" of languages, concluding that changes in word order tend to follow particular pathways, and the transmission of word order to a great extent vertical (i.e,. following the phylogenetic tree of ancestry) as opposed to horizontal (areal i.e., by diffusion). According to this analysis, the most recent ancestor of currently known languages was spoken recently enough to trace the whole evolutionary path of word order in most cases. A strong similarity exists between the linguistic tree and the genetic tree. 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 the object is a pronoun and VSO for questions; 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 as: * declarative * main clause * S and O must both be nominal arguments * pragmatically neutral, i.e. no element has special emphasis 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. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「word order」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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