Word order

Abstract

In many languages, word order plays a role parallel to morphological features, such as case marking and verbal agreement, in that it encodes basic relationships between syntactic elements, e.g., a verb and its core argument(s), or a head noun and its dependent(s). This chapter presents a summary of basic word order and related phenomena in the context of the Indigenous languages of Australia. Australian languages have been noted for their variability with respect to the ordering of words and/or constituents, though most show statistical preference for a single order, most commonly SOV or SVO. The chapter presents a summary of sentence- or utterance-level word and constituent order in both Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages. This is followed by an overview of word order phenomena in noun phrases.