+ subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier), for example:
Where does he live?
What are you writing now?
When did they visit Mexico?
Alternative questions
Alternative questions have the same word order as general questions:
Does he live in Paris or Rome?
Are you writing a report or a letter?
Tag questions
Tag questions consist of two parts. The first part has the same word order as statements, and the second part is a short general question (the tag):
He lives here, doesn't he?
They haven't seen this film, have they?
Commands (Imperative sentences)
Commands have the same word order as statements, but the subject (you) is usually omitted:
Go to your room.
Listen to the story.
Exclamatory sentences
Exclamatory sentences have the same word order as statements (ie, the subject is before the predicate):
She is a great singer!
It is an excellent opportunity!
How well he knows history!
What a beautiful town this is!
How strange it is!
In some types of exclamatory sentences, the subject (it, this, that) and the linking verb are often omitted, for example:
What a pity!
What a beautiful present!
How strange!
Simple, compound and complex sentences
English sentences are also divided into simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences.
A simple sentence, also called an independent clause, has a subject and predicate and other necessary parts of the sentence, for example:
Life goes on.
She lives in Moscow.
He wrote a letter to the manager.
A compound sentence has two SUBJECT + VERB pairs and two independent clauses connected by the conjunctions "and, but, or", for example:
Maria lives in Moscow, and her friend Elizabeth lives in New York.
He wrote a letter to the manager, but the manager didn't answer.
A complex sentence has one SUBJECT + VERB pair in the main clause, and one SUBJECT + VERB pair in the subordinate clause (dependent clause). The clauses are connected by subordinating conjunctions (eg that, after, when, since, because, if, though, etc.), for example:
I told him that I didn't know anything about their plans.
Betty has worked as a secretary since she moved to California.
If he comes back early, ask him to call me, please.
It's very important to learn basic word order rules and patterns by heart and follow them rigorously and precisely. The files of this section describe standard word order and its peculiarities in different types of English sentences.
Functions of sentence word order
A fixed or prototypical word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.
Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.
The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: An overwhelming majority of languages ​​have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.
Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we know that the language is strict accusative SVO, then we know that Grob smock Blug probably means that Grob is the smock er and Blug the entity smock ed. However, since very strict word order is rare in p...
