subject–verb–object
Sign in to saveAlso known as subject-verb-object, SVO, SVO language
sentence structure where the subject comes 1st, the verb 2nd, the object 3rd (e.g. “I ate a pie”); the default word order in English as well as Cantonese, French, Hausa, Italian, Malay, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, etc.
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- SVO
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In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate apples."
SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after subject–object–verb (SOV). Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 87% of the world's languages. The label SVO often includes ergative languages although they do not have nominative subjects.