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. ............