Word order and inversion
Word order and inversion
Introduction
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.
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.
For
most languages, basic word order can be defined in terms of the finite verb (V)
and its arguments, the subject (S)
and object (O).
The latter are typically noun phrases,
although some languages do not have a major word class of nouns.
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 OVS, and OSV being significantly more rare than two
preceding ones.
English language 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 word order, e.g. The
assistant greeted the professor.
Any deviation from the rigid word
order
is termed inversion, e.g. Often has he recollected the
glorious days of the Civil War.
The direct object is usually placed after the verb
unless the indirect object precedes it, e.g. He offered me his help. Sometimes
the object is pushed to the front of the sentence, it occurs when:
1.
The direct object is an interrogative word, which is naturally placed at the
head of the sentence to form a special question, e.g. What did you do?
2.
The object is separated from its verb by some other parts of the sentence –
adverbial complements, prepositional objects – when it is intentionally placed
at the end of the sentence for the sake of emphasis, logical stress, e.g. And
unexpectedly he saw against the background of the forest two approaching
figures.
The indirect object cannot be used in the sentence without
the direct object. The indirect object is regularly put before the direct
object. The prepositional objects can be put at the head of the sentence for
the sake of emphasis.
Occasionally the prepositional object is placed before the
direct object (in to-phrases).
Adverbial modifiers-the position of AM in the sentence is
known to be comparatively more free that that of other parts.
Those which are most closely linked with the part of the
sentence they modify are the ones that denote the frequency or the property of
an action. They come between the subject and the predicate, or even inside the
predicate if it consists of two words-an auxiliary and a notional verb, or two
elements of a compound predicate.
The more usual position of the
adverbial modifiers of time and place is, however, outside the group
“subject+predicate+object”, that is, either before or after it. If it contains
the main new things to be conveyed, this adverbial modifier will have to come
at the end of the sentence. The adverbial modifier of time can go at the
beginning of the sentence.
An adverbial modifier can also come in between two
components of the predicate.
Attributes- the position of an attribute before or
after it’s head word largely depends on it’s morphological type. An attribute
consisting of a prepositional phrase can only come after it’s head word. As to
adjectival attributes, their usual position is before their headword, but in
some case they follow it. An attribute expressed by an adverb may come before
its headword.
Direct address and parentheses- the position of these
parts of the sentence is probably more free that that of all other parts. A
direct address can come in almost anywhere in the sentence.
Much the same may be said about parentheses. Some
types of P usually come in between two constituent parts of the predicate.
P.may also refer to one part of the sentence only, and is then bound to come
before that part.
Particles-if a P belongs to a noun connected to a
noun connected with a preposition, the P will come between the preposition and
the noun. Sometimes a P refers to the word of phrase immediately preceding it.
This can only happen if the P stands at the end of the sentence or at least at
the end of a section of the sentence marked by a pause in oral speech and by a
comma or other punctuation mark in writing. This usage seems to be restricted
to more or less official style.
Sometimes a particle comes before the predicate or between
two elements of the predicate, while it refers to some secondary part of the
sentence standing further ahead. In these cases, then, the position of the
particle is determined, not by it’s semantic ties, but by the structure of the
sentence.
On the whole, the problem of WO proves to be a highly
complex one, requiring great care and subtlety in the handling. Different
factors have something to do with determining the place of one part of a
sentence or another.
Inversion which was briefly
mentioned in the definition of chiasmus is very often used as an independent SD
in which the direct word order is changed either completely so that the
predicate (predicative) precedes the subject, or partially so that the object
precedes the subject-predicate pair. Correspondingly, we differentiate between
a partial and a complete inversion. The stylistic device of inversion should
not be confused with. grammatical inversion which is a norm in interrogative
constructions. Stylistic inversion deals with. the rearrangement of the
normative word order. Questions may also be rearranged: "Your mother is at
home?" asks one of the characters of J. Baldwin's novel. The inverted
'question presupposes the answer with. more certainty than the normative one.
It is the assuredness of the speaker of the positive answer that constitutes
additional information which is brought into the question by the inverted word
order. Interrogative constructions with. the direct word order may be viewed as
cases of two-step (double) inversion: direct w / o ---> grammatical
inversion ---> direct w / o.
Basic Word Order
English
word order is strict and rather inflexible. As there are few endings in English
that show person, number, case or tense, English relies on word order to show
the relationships between the words in the sentence.
In
Russian, we rely on the endings to tell us how the words interact in the
sentence. You probably remember the phrase made up by Academician L.V. Scherba
to demonstrate the work of the endings and suffixes in Russian. (No English
translation for this phrase.) Everything we need to know about the interaction
of the characters in this sentence, we learn from the endings and suffixes.
English
nouns do not have any case endings (only personal pronouns have some case
endings), so it is mostly the word order that tells you where things are in the
sentence and how they interact. Compare these sentences:
The
cat sees the dog.
The
dog sees the cat.
The
subject and the object in these sentences are completely the same in form. How
do you know who sees whom? The rules of English word order tell you that.
Finding the basic word 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. It is difficult to
determine the order of elements one cannot identify in the first place. If
subject and object can be identified, 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. Russian, for example, has SVO transitive
clauses but free order (SV or VS) in intransitive clauses.[dubious
– discuss]
To have a valid base for comparison, the basic word order is defined[by whom?]
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[citation
needed], 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.
Word order patterns
A
sentence is a group of words containing a subject and a predicate and
expressing a complete thought.
Word
order arranges separate words into sentences in a certain way and indicates
where to find the subject, the predicate and the other parts of the sentence.
Word order and context help to identify the meanings of individual words.
The
main pattern of basic word order in English declarative sentences is SUBJECT +
PREDICATE + OBJECT, often called SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT (for example: Tom
writes stories). It means that if these three parts of the sentence are present
in a statement (a declarative sentence), the subject is placed before the
predicate, the predicate (the main verb) follows the subject, and the object is
placed after the main verb. Adverbial modifiers are placed after the object,
and adjectives are placed before their nouns.
Of
course, some sentences may have just one word (Write!), or only the subject and
predicate (Tom writes), or have an adverbial modifier and no object (Tom writes
well), and there are peculiarities, exceptions and preferences in word order,
but the pattern SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT (Tom writes stories) is the most
typical and the most common pattern of standard word order in English that
serves as a basis for word order in different types of sentences.
Sentence word orders
These
are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of
most common to rarest:
·
SOV is
the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it
include the prototypical Japanese, Mongolian,
Basque, Turkish, Korean, the Indo-Aryan languages
and the Dravidian languages.
Some, like Persian and Latin,
have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other
such languages.
·
SVO
languages include English, the
Romance languages,
Bulgarian,
Chinese and Swahili, among others.
·
VSO
languages include Classical Arabic,
the Insular Celtic
languages, and Hawaiian.
·
VOS
languages include Fijian and Malagasy.
·
OVS
languages include Hixkaryana.
·
OSV
languages include Xavante and Warao.
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 and Finnish, have no strict word order; rather,
the sentence structure is highly flexible. Nonetheless, there is often a
preferred order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent, and
obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles, for example Puun
kaatoi mies (tree-acc fell-perf man.NOM) ~ A/the man felled the tree
but puut kaatoivat miehet (tree-pl.nom/acc fell-perf-3p.pl
man-pl.nom/acc) ~ The trees felled the men. 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.
Word order in different sentences
English
sentences are divided into statements, questions, commands and exclamatory sentences.
Word order in different types of sentences has certain peculiarities.
Statements (Declarative sentences)
Statements
are the most common type of sentences. A standard statement uses the basic word
order pattern, i.e. SUBJECT + VERB (+ object + adverbial modifier). Adverbial
modifiers are placed at the end of the sentence after the object (or after the
verb, if there is no object). Attributes (adjectives, numerals, etc.) are
placed before their nouns, and attributes in the form of nouns with
prepositions are placed after their nouns.
Maria
works.
Tom
writes stories.
He
talked to Anna yesterday.
My
son bought three history books.
Tom
writes short stories for children.
Questions (Interrogative sentences)
General questions
Auxiliary
verb + subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier):
Does
he know English well?
Is
he writing a report now?
Have
you seen this film?
Special questions
Question
word + auxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier),
for example:
Where
does he live?
What
are you writing now?
When
did they visit Mexico?
Alternative questions
Alternative
questions have the same word order as general questions:
Does
he live in Paris or Rome?
Are
you writing a report or a letter?
Tag questions
Tag
questions consist of two parts. The first part has the same word order as
statements, and the second part is a short general question (the tag):
He
lives here, doesn’t he?
They
haven’t seen this film, have they?
Commands (Imperative sentences)
Commands
have the same word order as statements, but the subject (you) is usually
omitted:
Go
to your room.
Listen
to the story.
Exclamatory sentences
Exclamatory
sentences have the same word order as statements (i.e., the subject is before
the predicate):
She
is a great singer!
It
is an excellent opportunity!
How
well he knows history!
What
a beautiful town this is!
How
strange it is!
In
some types of exclamatory sentences, the subject (it, this, that) and the
linking verb are often omitted, for example:
What
a pity!
What
a beautiful present!
How
strange!
Simple, compound and complex sentences
English
sentences are also divided into simple sentences, compound sentences and
complex sentences.
A
simple sentence, also called an independent clause, has a subject and predicate
and other necessary parts of the sentence, for example:
Life
goes on.
She
lives in Moscow.
He
wrote a letter to the manager.
A
compound sentence has two SUBJECT + VERB pairs and two independent clauses
connected by the conjunctions “and, but, or”, for example:
Maria
lives in Moscow, and her friend Elizabeth lives in New York.
He
wrote a letter to the manager, but the manager didn’t answer.
A
complex sentence has one SUBJECT + VERB pair in the main clause, and one
SUBJECT + VERB pair in the subordinate clause (dependent clause). The clauses
are connected by subordinating conjunctions (e.g. that, after, when, since,
because, if, though, etc.), for example:
I
told him that I didn’t know anything about their plans.
Betty
has worked as a secretary since she moved to California.
If
he comes back early, ask him to call me, please.
It’s
very important to learn basic word order rules and patterns by heart and follow
them rigorously and precisely. The files of this section describe standard word
order and its peculiarities in different types of English sentences.
Functions of sentence 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.
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.
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
Main articles:
Branching
(linguistics) and Head
directionality parameter
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
·
adjective
(red house vs house red)
·
determiner
(this house vs house this)
·
numeral
(two houses vs houses two)
·
possessor
(my house vs house my)
·
relative
clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)
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.)
Free 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,
Hungarian,
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]
o
Armenian
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 this", but OSV is also possible: "This 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, as
well as in many other languages.
Inversion (meteorology)
In
meteorology, an inversion is a deviation from the normal change of an
atmospheric property with altitude. It almost always refers to a temperature
inversion, i.e., an increase in temperature with height, or to the layer (inversion
layer) within which such an increase occurs.
An
inversion can lead to pollution such as smog
being trapped close to the ground, with possible adverse effects on health. An
inversion can also suppress convection by acting
as a "cap". If this cap is broken for any of several reasons,
convection of any moisture present can then erupt into violent thunderstorms. Temperature inversion can
notoriously result in freezing rain
in cold climates.
Normal atmospheric conditions
Usually,
within the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) the air near the surface of
the Earth is warmer than the air above it,
largely because the atmosphere is heated from below as solar radiation warms
the Earth's surface, which in turn then warms the layer of the atmosphere
directly above it e.g. by thermals (convective heat
transfer).
How and why inversions occur
Under
certain conditions, the normal vertical temperature gradient is inverted such
that the air is colder near the surface of the Earth. This can occur when, for
example, a warmer, less dense air mass moves over a cooler, denser air mass.
This type of inversion occurs in the vicinity of warm fronts, and also in areas of oceanic upwelling such as along the California
coast. With sufficient humidity in the cooler layer, fog
is typically present below the inversion cap. An inversion is also produced
whenever radiation from the surface of the earth exceeds the amount of
radiation received from the sun, which commonly occurs at night, or during the
winter when the angle of the sun is very low in the sky. This effect is virtually
confined to land regions as the ocean retains heat far longer. In the polar
regions during winter, inversions are nearly always present over land.
A
warmer air mass moving over a cooler one can "shut off" any
convection which may be present in the cooler air mass. This is known as a capping inversion. However, if this cap is
broken, either by extreme convection overcoming the cap, or by the lifting
effect of a front or a mountain range, the sudden release of bottled-up
convective energy — like the bursting of a balloon — can result in severe
thunderstorms. Such capping inversions typically precede the development of
tornadoes in the midwestern United States. In this instance, the
"cooler" layer is actually quite warm, but is still denser and
usually cooler than the lower part of the inversion layer capping it.
Subsidence inversion
An
inversion can develop aloft as a result of air gradually sinking over a wide
area and being warmed by adiabatic
compression, usually associated with subtropical high pressure areas. A stable marine layer may then develop over the
ocean as a result. As this layer moves over progressively warmer waters,
however, turbulence within the marine layer can gradually lift the inversion
layer to higher altitudes, and eventually, even pierce it, producing
thunderstorms, and under the right circumstances, leading to tropical cyclones. The accumulated smog and
dust under the inversion quickly taints the sky reddish, easily seen on sunny
days.
Consequences of a thermal inversion
With
the ceasing of convection, which is normally present in the atmosphere, a
number of phenomena are associated with a temperature inversion. The air
becomes stiller, hence the air becomes murky because dust and pollutants are no
longer lifted from the surface.
This
can become a problem in cities where many pollutants exist. Inversion effects
occur frequently in big cities such as Mumbai, India; Los Angeles,
California; Mexico City ;
Sao Paulo, Brazil;
Santiago, Chile; and Tehran, Iran, but also in smaller cities
like Oslo, Norway, Salt Lake City,
Utah, and Boise, Idaho,
which are closely surrounded by hills and mountains that together with the
inversion effect bottle-caps the air in the city. During a severe inversion,
trapped air pollutants form a brownish haze that can cause respiratory
problems. The Great Smog,
one of the most serious examples of such an inversion, occurred in London in 1952 and was blamed for thousands of deaths.
Sometimes
the inversion layer is higher so that the cumulus clouds can condense but then they
spread out under the inversion layer. This cuts out sunlight to the ground and
prevents new thermals from forming. A period of
cloudiness is followed by sunny weather as the clouds disperse. This cycle can
occur more than once in a day.
The
index of refraction of air decreases as the
air temperature increases, a side effect of hotter air being less dense.
Normally this results in distant objects being shortened vertically, an effect
that is easy to see at sunset (where the sun is "squished" into an
oval). In an inversion the normal pattern is reversed, and distant objects are
instead stretched out or appear to be above the horizon. This leads to the
interesting optical effects of Fata Morgana
or mirage.
Similarly,
very-high frequency (VHF - 30 to 300 MHz) radio waves (being
part of the electromagnetic
spectrum, like light) can be refracted by such inversions. This is
why it is possible to sometimes hear FM radio (or watch VHF-LO band TV)
broadcasts from otherwise impossible distances as far as a few hundred miles
distant on foggy nights. The signal,
still powerful enough to be received even at hundreds or rarely, thousands, of
miles, would normally be refracted up and away
from the ground-based antenna,
is instead refracted down towards the earth by the temperature-inversion
boundary layer. This phenomenon is called
tropospheric
ducting. It is also referred to as skip by small radio operators and Ham
operators. Along coast lines during Autumn and Spring many FM radio stations are
plagued by severe signal degradation causing them to sound like "scrambled
eggs".
Inversions
can magnify the so called "green flash": a phenomenon occurring
at sunrise/sunset, usually visible for a few seconds, in which the sun's green
light is isolated due to dispersion - the shorter wavelength is refracted most,
so it is the first/last light from the upper rim of the solar disc to be seen.
In
addition, when an inversion layer is present (for example early in the morning
when ground-level air temperatures are cool, and high-level air temperatures
are warmer), if a sound or explosion occurs at ground level, the sound wave can
get totally reflected from the warmer upper layer (in which the sound travel
faster, i.e. the air has lower acoustic refractive index, so the sound can
undergo total internal
reflection) and return back to ground level; the sound is therefore
heard much further than normal. The shockwave from an explosion can be
reflected by an inversion layer in much the same way as it bounces off the
ground in an air-burst and can cause additional damage as a result. This
phenomenon killed three people in the RDS-37 nuclear test.
In
an inversion, vertical motion in the atmosphere is suppressed because the
atmosphere is stable. Hence vertical heat transport by eddies is suppressed;
this reduced (downwards) heat transport leads to further cooling of the lower
surface. This can lead to an effective decoupling of the atmosphere from the
surface in extreme conditions, such as may be found in Antarctica during the
polar night, where inversions greater than 25 °C commonly occur. When it happens the sky is a reddish
color.
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