1.5. SENTENCE STRUCTURE 39
how languages order these three words classes, leading to the conclusions
that English, for instance, is an SVO language, while Japanese is an SOV
language: in English, most sentences are of the form ”we do something”,
where the subject (”we”) precedes the verb (”do”) which in turn precedes
the object (”something”) for that verb. Japanese, in contrast, follows a dif-
ferent ordering: most sentences are of the form ”we, something do” (with
the comma added purely for ease of reading) where the subject precedes
the object for the verb, after which the actual verb is used. There are also
VSO languages, such as formal Arabic or Welsh, where the sentence struc-
ture is predominantly ”do, we, something” and VOS languages, such as
Malagasi (used in Madagascar) and Fijian (used in Fiji) where the struc-
ture is predominantly ”do something, we”.
However, while this terminology allows us to broadly categorise
languages, based on what the ’typically used’ paĴern looks like, it doesn’t
tell us anything about how correct or incorrect sentences are if they do not
adhere to these S/V/O ”rules”. For instance, while ”we ate some cake” is
a normal English sentence, a slightly less conventional but still grammat-
ically perfectly valid English sentence could be ”cake; we ate some”. This
sentence does not fall in the SVO category that is associated with English,
but that doesn’t mean it’s an incorrect sentence – it just means the SVO la-
bel doesn’t tell the whole story. This becomes particularly apparent when
we look at what ”minimal sentences” may look like in different languages.
In English, a minimal sentence (that is, one that isn’t considered an
expression like ”hi!” or ”hmm”) consists of a subject and a verb: ”I ate”
or ”she runs” are examples of minimal sentences. Trying to shorten a sen-
tence further – without making the sentence context sensitive – yields bro-
ken English, which is arguably simply not English. This notion of context
is important: if we are asked ”who ate the cookies?” and we answer with
”me”, then this ”me” is technically a sentence comprised of a single word,
and sounds natural. However, if we were to use the sentence ”me.” on its
own, it is impossible to tell what we mean by it. This means that while
English is an SVO language, it’s really an SV(O) language: you need an S,
you need a V, and if you use an O, it comes last, but you’re not obliged to
have one.
When we look at Japanese we see the S/V/O category crumbling
even further. Rather than just being an SOV language, it’s actually an
(S)(O)V language: You need a verb, but you don’t need a subject or object at
all to form a correct minimal sentence in Japanese. While in English saying
”ate” is considered not enough information to make sense of, Japanese is a
language in which competent listeners or readers fill in these blanks them-
selves, choosing which subject and object make the most sense, given what