Word order

 

Unfortunately for the English language, it is not only students in Poland but all the other nations using European languages that tend to think that our language is the confusing one; our habit of putting adjectives and possessive forms before nouns, for example.

 

If I was to summarise how our language works in terms of syntax – or talking about the way we put words together, and in the correct order – then English is a language in which words are individual and do not depend on adding endings to change its tense or its relationship to something. Because of this, it is often referred to as an SVO language – that is, it follows a word order rule on the basis of Subject, Verb, object: for example, Janet (subject) loves (verb) John (object); factory (subject) is making (verb) lots of money (object). By contrast, Polish and all the other Slavic languages are synthetic and inflexional languages, in which additional letters are added to words to indicate the tense, or whether a noun is a subject or an object and its relationship with the subject/object. As a result, their word order is more flexible.

 

But we do have a few rules which place emphases on certain points which the learner has to try and learn.

 

Here are some examples, the first being an explanation of the cartoon...

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