Abstract
The purpose of this study is to consider those structures in English which do not exhibit a canonical order, that is an SVO constituent order (considered as the basic and dominant order for English) and the principles which can explain their existence in the language. In the first section we identify these non-SVO constructions in English and in the second we look at some of the pragmatic and functional factors underlying these structures, including notions like theme, verb-object bonding, animatedness, accessibility of the linguistic material and others. To conclude, we postulate that any exhaustive study of word order should present not only a functional and pragmatic dimension but also a more formal one, which would include typological and diachronic factors.
Highlights
English is considered one of the most consistent and rigid SVO languages.[1]
Intonation is capable of providing three coding functions, according to Stockwell (84): a separational function, by rythmic spacing of words into clusters; afocusing function, by attaching pitch prominence to semantically important material, and by destressing anaphoric material; and an identijying function, by assignment of special contours to special sentence types like questions. Most of these functions are duplicated in the language by other devices such as serial word order, morphological agreement or specially marked constructions
This has not been an exhaustive study on the issue of non-canonical order constructions in English at all, we can, state that, in our opinión, the subject cannot be exclusively considered from a single point of view
Summary
English is considered one of the most consistent and rigid SVO languages.[1]. Oíd English was more a synthetic language and relied mainly on inflectional morphology, Modern English has developed into an analytical language in which word order is the main signal of grammatical relations. As a compensation for this fixed order and virtual absence of inflectional endings, English exhibits, on the other hand, a remarkable freedom and flexibility in the assignation of semantic roles to grammatical relations so that it permits an unusual degree of discrepancy between the semantic form and surface structure.[2] a subject NP may, in principie, represent a wide range of participant roles, e.g. agent, patient, instrument, beneficiary, experiencer, etc. Despite this dominant SVO order, English has structures in which this is not so. Due to the limited length of this paper, we will mainly look in here at linguistic factors like the functional and pragmatic principies underlying these structures, our opinión is that more formal considerations (like those related to language typologies and diachronic factors) should be taken into account in an exhaustive study of the subject
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