2.3. Word order
In general, word order concerns the order of subject (S), object (O) and verb (V) with respect to each other and their order within a clause or a phrase. Referring to the notion of basic word order, the term usually deals with the order of S, O and V at sentential level, in particular, within an unmarked declarative sentence. There are six possible word order patterns, namely SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS, languages can belong to. Languages vary regarding word order type, but most of the described languages either belong to SOV or SVO. Nevertheless, there is a small number of languages that don’t fit to any of these types and show free word order. This chapter deals with word order patterns found in DGS. One the hand, it describes word order that occurs in a main declarative clause [Syntax 2.3.1]and on the other hand, word order patterns that appear in other clauses [Syntax 2.3.2]. Since information structure and the syntactic and semantic behavior of a verb can lead to word order variations within a language, such variations found in DGS will be described in [Syntax 2.3.3].