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Tamil being a strongly head-final language, the basic word-order is SOV. However, since it is highly inflected, word order is flexible and is used for pragmatic purposes. That is, fronting a word in a sentence adds emphasis on it; for instance, a VSO order would indicate greater emphasis on the verb, the action, than on the subject or the object.
These are all possible word orders for the subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object): SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include Japanese , Korean , Mongolian , Turkish , the Indo-Aryan ...
An example of SVO order in English is: Andy ate cereal. In an analytic language such as English, subject–verb–object order is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. ("The dog bit Andy" and "Andy bit the dog" mean two completely different things, while, in case of ...
For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech , and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number , tense , and aspect .
Unlike English, which places a relative clause (RC) after the head noun that it modifies, Cantonese is very unusual among SVO languages by placing relative clauses before head nouns and by having prenominal relative clauses, which cause a VOS word order, as is seen in most subject-gapped relative clauses. [9]
Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition. For example, in some languages with bound case markings for nouns, such as Language X, varying degrees of freedom in constituent order are observed.
In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun (head noun) water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound.
In an ordinary English clause, the subject is normally the same as the topic/theme (example 1), even in the passive voice (where the subject is a patient, not an agent: example 2): The dog bit the little girl. The little girl was bitten by the dog. These clauses have different topics: the first is about the dog, and the second about the little ...