In linguistic typology, agent-verb-object (AVO), commonly called subject-verb-object (SVO), is a sentence structure where the agent comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements. The AVO and Agent Object Verb orders are by far the two most common, accounting for more than 75% of the world's languages which have a preferred order. Spanish, EnglishOSV is also used, largely in poetry., Portuguese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, the Romance languages, Russian, Bulgarian, Kiswahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Nahuatl, Quiche, Guaraní, Javanese, Malay and Indonesian are examples of languages that follow an AVO pattern.

An example of AVO order in English is:

Sam ate the oranges.

In this, Sam is the subject, ate is the verb, the oranges is the object.

Some languages are more complicated: in German and in Dutch, an ancestral AOV order is retained in subordinate clauses even though AVO is the unmarked order in main declarative clauses. (See V2 word order.)

See also

• Topic-prominent language
• Agent Object Verb
• Verb Agent Object

Sources