The word order doesn’t have to go subject, verb, object — any order will work as long as it's consistent within a given language. For example, in Hindi, the typical order is subject, object, verb.

The object-first languages (OSV and OVS) all derive from SOV. Basically, all languages eventually lead back to a subject-object-verb word order.

When a transitive verb can't act on anything, in fact, expect the sentence to make no sense at all. A direct object, however, need not always be someone or something other than the subject itself. In ...

An inversion means the change of word order in a sentence or a clause. The concept of subject-verb inversion is applied to sentences with main constituent order Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), meaning ...

In conjunction with Bybee's (1985) parameters of fusion and distance, the VOB principle makes two specific predictions with respect to the pronominal system: (i) that the object pronoun is more ...

On Ruhlen and Gell-Mann’s tree, subject-verb-object languages always descend from subject-object-verb languages, but never the other way around.

The subject should match the verb, writes June Casagrande, as in “The cats can catch their tails.” But agreement isn’t always easy, she explains.