The Gramma? Book, Second Edition, is designed to help prospective and practicing teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) enhance their understanding of English grammar, expand their skills in linguistic analysis, and develop a pedagogical approach to teaching English grammar. | Chapter Introduction to Phrase Structure Word Order in English and Other Languages In English word order within sentences is less flexible than it is in many other languages or than it was in English 1 000 years ago. One reason for this is that English has lost most of its original Germanic system of inflections. This was a system of 1 suffixes on nouns and adjectives that reflected the gender number and case of every noun in a sentence and 2 suffixes on verbs that reflected past or present tense as well as the person and number of the subject noun. Without recourse to this full range of inflections to mark subjects and objects of various kinds . English came to rely on a more fixed word order to distinguish subjects from objects. The basic underlying word order in an English sentence is subject-verb-object S-V-O Example joe writes poetry. S V O This rather fixed word order operates in conjunction with prepositions which help to indicate the semantic functions of certain objects that arc not direct objects. For example in the following sentence the preposition with signals that its object noun Sarah is in some sense the source of Joe s agreement Example Joe agrees with Sarah. S V Prep O Thus we say that English is an S-V-O language like French Spanish and many other languages. However a major difference exists between English and French on the one hand and Spanish on the other both English and French require that a subject noun of some sort appear in all but certain imperative sentences whereas Spanish does not have this requirement for sentences with pronominal subjects. For example I speak English. Je parle français. Yo hablo español. I speak French. I speak Spanish. In fact the most frequent version of the Spanish example omits the first person subject pronoun yo. Spanish can delete pronominal subjects because it has a rich system of verb inflections that unambiguously indicate the person and number of the subject. If you have studied only languages like English
