Book contents
- Inventing Languages
- Inventing Languages
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Glossing Conventions
- IPA Alphabet
- 1 What Are Constructed Languages?
- 2 World Building
- 3 Designing Vowel Inventories
- 4 Designing Consonant Inventories
- 5 From Sounds to Syllables
- 6 Stress and Tone
- 7 The Lexicon
- 8 The Morphology of Nouns
- 9 The Morphology of Verbs
- 10 Word Order
- 11 Statements, Questions and Commands
- 12 Negation and Evidentials
- 13 Complex Sentences
- 14 Writing Systems
- 15 Semantics and Pragmatics
- 16 Variation in Space and Time
- 17 Language Channels and Modalities
- 18 Wrapping Up and Moving Forward
- Appendix A Natlangs Mentioned
- Appendix B Conlangs Mentioned
- References
- Index
10 - Word Order
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2025
Book contents
- Inventing Languages
- Inventing Languages
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Glossing Conventions
- IPA Alphabet
- 1 What Are Constructed Languages?
- 2 World Building
- 3 Designing Vowel Inventories
- 4 Designing Consonant Inventories
- 5 From Sounds to Syllables
- 6 Stress and Tone
- 7 The Lexicon
- 8 The Morphology of Nouns
- 9 The Morphology of Verbs
- 10 Word Order
- 11 Statements, Questions and Commands
- 12 Negation and Evidentials
- 13 Complex Sentences
- 14 Writing Systems
- 15 Semantics and Pragmatics
- 16 Variation in Space and Time
- 17 Language Channels and Modalities
- 18 Wrapping Up and Moving Forward
- Appendix A Natlangs Mentioned
- Appendix B Conlangs Mentioned
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter introduces syntax, i.e. sentence structure. It distinguishes between clauses and sentences and discusses sentence constituents and constituency tests. This chapter also discusses sentence structure and word order, which can be fixed or flexible, and considers how some word orders tend to correlate with other linguistic characteristics in a language. In addition, this chapter provides conlanging practice, a set of guided questions to develop the basic structure of sentences in a conlang, and outlines the sentence structure of the Salt language.
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- Inventing LanguagesA Practical Introduction, pp. 189 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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