Practice question · True or false
All six logically possible orders of subject, object and verb are attested in some language.
Hints
- Consider whether the rarest orders exist at all.
- OVS and OSV are attested, in a handful of languages each.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, though the last two are vanishingly rare, a handful of languages each, several of them Amazonian. Their existence matters out of proportion to their number: it turns "subject before object" from an absolute universal into a statistical one, which is a different kind of claim.
Practise Universals and Typology
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More questions on Universals and Typology
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