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In linguistics, an OV language (object–verb language), or a language with object-verb word order, is a language in which the object comes before the verb. OV languages compose approximately forty-seven percent of documented languages.
Languages that contain both OV and VO constructions may solidify into one or the other construction in the course of their historical development. A language that moves the verb or verb phrase more than the object will have surface VO word order, and a language that moves the object more than the verb or verb phrase will have surface OV word order.
אני אוהב אותה would mean "I love her", but "אותה אני אוהב" would mean "It is she whom I love". [5] Possibly an influence of Germanic (via Yiddish), as Jewish English uses a similar construction ("You, I like, kid") much more than many other varieties of English and often with the "it is" left implicit.
The passive voice in English may appear to be in the OVS order, but that is not an accurate description. In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the apples, the grammatical subject, Sam , is the agent and is acting on the patient , the apples , which are the object of the verb, ate .
Portuguese is a Western Romance language spoken in many places around the globe: Portugal, Brazil, Macau, etc. The language is split into European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese . European Portuguese is said to have a very flexible word order, and one of its grammatical possibilities is VOS.
This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage. [30] Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example: "It was our selfe thou didst abuse." [31] A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as a grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic.
In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam apples ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate apples" which is subject–verb–object (SVO).
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 ...