Talk:Object–verb–agent

The article says that the passive voice in English is OVS, but it is not. The article sites the example "The oranges were eaten by Sam" as the passive voice form of "Sam eats the oranges, which is correct. However, if one uses pronouns for "Sam" and "oranges", we see that "He eats them" becomes "They are eaten by him"; if the passive voice were truely OVS, then the sentance would be "Them is eaten by he", or more correctly "them is eaten by him", since "Sam" is the object of a past-tense participial phrase with "eaten by". Please correct me if I am somehow mistaken. Phsyron 22:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

You are correct, roughly. I've rewritten the passage to reflect the actual definitions of grammatical terms like subject, object, and agent. Craig Butz 06:17, 12 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

In order to respond to the Oranges Example: The only reason why hapless Sam isn't devoured by that decidedly unfriendly bunch of oranges is the knack of the English language to use a minimum of flection, hence a maximum of context. For a German speaker the sentence would sound strange only because it conveys a certain insistance that it was oranges he ate and nothing else - but would be comprehensible and grammatically perfectly unconspicuous by the conjugation of the verb, something that only huge-*** inflecting languages are able to deliver:

Orangen asz Sam. (the sz is of course the ligature unbeknownst to American browsers, asz is the 3. Pers. Sg. of "essen" = to eat)

The rather funny version would be

Orangen aszen Sam. (where aszen is the 3. Pers. Pl. (!) of "essen")

But OVS is often used in German, even apart from poetry, when the object must be stressed:

"Dieses Wetter mag der Elefant nicht." (with the stress on "dieses" = this)

which translates word-by-word to

"This weather doesn't like the elephant."

but means:

"The elephant doesn't like this particular weather (but others)."

and this meaning is denoted by the use of "der Elefant" (nominative, ["subjective" if you like] case) instead of "den Elefanten" (accusative, [one of the "objective"] cases. So, had the sentence been

"Dieses Wetter mag den Elefanten nicht."

then indeed the sense would be:

"This weather doesn't like the elephant."

I think the sentence is possible, but realatively uncommon. Actually, the more inflected, (and less analytic,) a language is, the more possibilities there are to use a creative word order...

BTW, isn't the "Eszet" almost discarded from the german language, except for a few particular words?

Yes and "ate" is one of the words that retained it :P -- KittySaturn 09:37, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

No, the ß is still in common use, the spelling has just been regularised so the rules for when to use it and when not to are consistent.

Latin also has the genitive case:

The wine Marci (Marcus' wine) is fine.

and finally the ablative case:

She is cleverer Marco. (than Marco, abl. comparationis, it's hard to find a reasonable example for this elusive case)

Maybe you should add those two to the entry!

Greetings Max

German is an incredibly complicated and unusual case. Essentially, under Transformational grammar German is underlyingly SOV (you can see this in phrases such as Ich habe gedacht, dass der Mann den Jungen sah - I thought that the man saw the boy, where the second clause is SOV). However, in most sentences, the verb moves to the place which would be occupied by a complementizer such as dass or weil. Following this, a word (usually the subject of the sentence, but not always, it can be an object, or even an adverb - for example, you can have Gestern sah der Mann den Jungen -Yesterday the man saw the boy) moves to the specifier of this position, creating the phenomenon you describe above. BovineBeast 18:36, 4 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

I already wrote the text that would accompany it, but I'm afraid for the moment I'm not gonna write it yet.

"==Long Example== To give you an impression how weird this sounds, here is an excerpt of Klingon spoken in an episode of Star Trek translated to English but with the words left in the Klingon word order.

Notice: I'm sorry I'm going to take a break, this will have to wait after my break. I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a note on the talk page where I could find such an excerpt. (The Star Trek Wiki maybe????)

It really sounds far-out as you see. (Double meaning intended!)"

Reading Inuktitut language, I found Inuktitut a good example for OVS, but hestating to put it because I'm not good at linguistics and not sure strictly whether Inuktitut is OVS. --Puzzlet Chung 14:48, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I can see your point, but--glancing at Inuktitut morphology and syntax--I don't think it's accurate to describe it as consistently OVS. First, the extremely extensive polysyntheticity makes it hard (and perhaps impossible) to apply any such labels to it (more or less proving, I guess, the flaws in this kind of typology).

Second, although some of the examples on Inuktitut morphology and syntax appear to place the object before the subject (Nanuq qukiqtara: I just shot the polar bear), others (such as Piitaup takujaatit: Peter sees you) put the subject first. The pattern I can see here is that pronouns (whether subject or object) are suffixed to the verb, and nouns are placed first. There aren't many examples in the Wikipedia articles where both subject and object are nouns, but the one I could find makes me none the wiser as to which word order is preferred: Piitaup paliisi takupauk? Aakka, paliisinik Piita takujuq. Does Peter see the policeman? No, Peter sees some policemen.

I think it's safe to conclude that we should just avoid trying to classify Inuktitut by word order. I'm curious now, though, as to what hidden rules decide the word order. EldKatt (Talk) 13:47, 8 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Well, the examples you give show Inuktitut as being definitely verb-final. It's probably underlyingly SOV with topicalisation. BovineBeast 18:26, 4 February 2007 (UTC)Reply

Yakov Smirnov's "In Soviet Russia" jokes seem to be an example of OVS. For example, "We watch television" becomes "Television watches you," or more appropriately, "In Soviet Russia, television watches you." Scott Gall 12:48, 15 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

In "Television watches you", television becomes the subject and you the object. It's still SVO. EldKatt (Talk) 13:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

I believe Esperanto is one of the most flexible languages regarding word order. Therefore it is possible to have all the combinations for "Vi estas bela" (which is the most common order anyway): "Vi estas bela" "Bela estas vi" "Vi bela estas" "Bela vi estas" "Estas bela vi" "Estas vi bela"

It's easier when the verb is not "esti" or there is no preposition in-between, as there is an accusative in the object: "Mi manĝas la kukon" "La kukon mi manĝas" "Manĝas mi la kukon" "Manĝas la kukon mi"

But as for me, being a Spanish-speaker, the most common order in Esperanto would be SVO, rather than OVS, yet I wouldn't fix Esperanto in any particular order.

SVO being the most common word order in Esperanto, and the other words orders used for special emphasis, it makes sense to describe it as a SVO language. The flexibility is less when you have a copular sentence with two nouns rather than a noun and adjective, or an active sentence with subject and object being two partitive noun phrases with "da" -- the fact that you pretty much have to use SVO in those sentences to be understood is further evidence that SVO is Esperanto's main order. --Jim Henry 14:17, 9 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

Jim is right. Esperanto is mainly SVO, but since this is a possible word order, it belongs here more than the faulty passive tense referance and the French example. I would suggest a simpler sentance, even using the "Sam eats oranges" example used throught the article, giving you "Samo manĝas oranĝojn," and "Oranĝojn manĝas Samo." Phsyron 22:42, 19 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

I agree with the proposed merge. --Jim Henry 14:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)Reply