Word order in English | Canguro English

welcome to spring hello and welcome to kangaroo English I'm a Christian and today we are going to be talking about word order so before I start this class I want to play a little game with you have a look at this sentence she told him that she loved him now there is a word in English that we can put in any position in this sentence we can put it here at the beginning or here or here here in in any position do you know what that word is only only there's a very special word because we can put it anywhere in this sentence and it slightly changes the meaning only she told him that she loved him she only told him that she loved him she told him that only she loved him etc so you can see that word order is not a simple set of rules word order is something much more beautiful and subtle and nuanced and that is what we are going to be talking about today one more thing before we start we need to talk about this let me show you how I feel about this [Laughter] now we can start off every language in the world has a preferred order for the different grammatical parts and English is an SVO language which means that we prefer to have the subject and then the verb and then the object but before we can talk more about the order let's understand exactly what the subject and the verb and the object are so we are going to start with the verb okay because without the verb there is no there is nothing the verb is the most important thing in a clause okay a verb is a word that describes an action or an occurrence or a state of being okay this is a verb and then we have the subject and the object and in a way these are both very closely related because they are related to the verb the subject is the person or the thing performing the action of the verb and the object is the person or the thing which is affected by the verb so we could say that the subject and object are very similar it just depends which one you think is more important now a clause can contain more than one subject and more than one object for example I gave Maria a pizza so here we have a single subject I okay then we have the verb give okay here but here we have two objects okay we have an indirect object and we have a direct object how do we know the difference well we look at the verb give and we say what are we giving are we giving Maria no we are giving a pizza so because the verb gives relates to the pizza not to Maria then the pizza is the direct object and Maria is receiving the pizza so she is the indirect object here in this sentence you can see that we have two subjects me and Paco gave Maria a pizza okay so sometimes clauses can have more than one subject more than one object and of course also more than one verb so now we know that English is subject verb object and we understand the concepts of the subject and the direct object indirect object etc now let's talk about situations where it's obligatory to break the SVO rule okay so for example in questions when we make questions in English we use inversion okay and this inversion breaks the SVO rule also when you transform from active to passive we are moving what was the object into the subject position okay it appears to break this rule the SVO rule and finally as well in imperatives eat your pizza okay I'm breaking this strict rule but these are obligatory situations now let's talk about why and when you would deliberately break the SVO rule when we communicate in a language whether it's writing an email or speaking on the telephone or having a conversation our objective is to convey meaning and we can convey meaning in various different ways with punctuation with our choice of words with gestures with the tone of voice but another really important way to convey meaning is with our information structure okay the way the way that we structure our sentences can help us to give additional meaning or to change the meaning of sentences when you structure your sentences in English there are three important things to consider the first one is the principle of given before new which means that in general we prefer to put old information things that we know about before new information okay the second thing is end weight if we have a group of words that's very complex or a concept that's very dense then we prefer to put this at the end so it's easier to process and the third thing is of course to highlight information when we deliberately change the structure the order of words in English this is called hyper baton and I'm going to be showing you some examples of all three of these concepts first let's talk about proposing proposing is when we take something that is normally in the middle or the end of a sentence and we put it at the beginning we change the standard word order completely and when we move something to the beginning of a sentence in English we are giving it extra emphasis extra focus for example here is our original sentence okay he removed the lid carefully subject-verb-object but we can change the order to give more focus to something else carefully he removed the lid in this sentence our focus is on the idea of he took it carefully on the adverb here and this is a very radical change we have the object at the beginning that Liz he removed carefully so so our focus is is on the lid and finally removing the lid carefully here when we use the verb at the beginning of the sentence we are focusing on on the action of removing now let's talk about post posing post posing is when we move something to the end of sentence and the first reason that we use post posing can be to create a dramatic effect okay to create a build of suspense so our original would be a big wolf subject came through well came ok verb through the door okay and what we're going to do now is we're going to put our phrase here at the beginning through the door our prepositional phrase and then we're going to have verb and then subject so do you see the suspense through the door came a big wolf it changes the meaning the the way that I present this information to you another reason we use post posing is to help the listener or the reader process the information more easily so do you remember I talked about end weight if a concept or a sentence is very heavy we put it at the end look at this example my English classes give students teachers parents children travelers and professionals help so the the verb give and giving help they are very isolated there's a lot of words in-between give and help so maybe when I'm reading I I lose the connection between giving help so I can move this here and I put the heavy part of the sentence okay I put this heavy part at the end my English classes give help to students teachers parents children travelers and professionals it's much easier to process the next thing we're going to talk about is the cleft sentence this is another structure we can use to highlight important information so imagine that we are talking and you say to me Christian yesterday you met my dad did you like my dad did you get on with my dad and I say no I didn't meet your dad I met your sister okay so this is the typical subject-verb-object I met your sister but we can change the structure to highlight the the mistake the misunderstanding and we can do this using it or the hot words who who why when where etc okay so it was your sister I met so here we are bringing this information to the front to give it the extra emphasis and again here the who is of course your sister who I met was your sister so these types of cleft sentences can help us to portray more more subtle meaning when we're speaking another way that we can bring focus onto something is by using thing like the thing something one thing okay for example I love the pizza in Italy so here you can see that you know psychologically we are focused on the idea that I love something okay but look at this sentence the thing I love in Italy is the pizza so the thing of course is is the pizza but because I'm bringing it to the front I'm really focusing more on the pizza then me and what I love so I wanted to show you today that yes English has a preferred word order subject-verb-object but it is absolutely possible to break this order to create a special effect and you shouldn't be afraid to experiment with trying different word orders but be careful okay don't use it all the time because then people will think that you are just making mistakes but you can definitely use it to create emphasis and to create interest and variation when you are speaking or writing well I hope that you found that class interesting and I hope that now you feel much more confident about your word order in English if you would like to see any more videos about the English language then don't forget to subscribe I'm Christian this is kangaroo English I'll see you in class [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 117,683

Keywords: word order, english word order, canguro, learning english, learn english, english grammar, grammar, word order in English, SVO, word order in english

Id: tvYyHLeYMZw

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2017