Sentences, obviously, have many more parts. And that means we can have many different possible ways of ordering them. If I would not just have 3 cakes here, but 15, there would be many, many, many different ways of ordering 15 cakes. Now, again what's interesting is that we find a lot of variation also in real languages, so many of these different possible orders are actually also attested in real languages. But what's even more exciting is that there is some structure to this. It's not all completely random. That's the topic for typologists. Typologists are linguists who study many languages and compare them in certain dimensions. A famous typologist, maybe the most famous typologist ever, was the 20th century American linguist Joseph Greenberg. And he studied correlations between different word orders, the kinds of word orders we have just seen. So he discovered that whenever we find a language in which the verb comes before the object, we can make a prediction about where the adjective will be with respect to the noun. The prediction will be that it will be like French, that the adjective will follow the noun. You can see it here. So blanche is the adjective white, maison is the noun house, and you say maison blanche, or you say house white in French. And French also has the verb before the object. So that's very nice. Okay. It's very nice but it doesn't always work, it's a tendency. English doesn't have it like that. English is therefore, typologically kind of strange in this respect. French is a language like many other languages are. Some other languages have it the other way around, but then they have everything the other way around. Japanese for instance, Japanese is the mirror image of French in many different respects. So it has the object before the verb, as you can see. And it also has the adjective before the noun, as you can see again. So that's the other possibility. So you put everything in the opposite order. And even the third factor we mentioned, prepositions, postpositions, correlates. So French type languages, which have VO and adjectives after the noun, also tend to have prepositions, again, not all of them do, but most of them do. And Japanese type languages tend to have postpositions. Again, they are the mirror image. It's almost like you take a French sentence, you write every word in the opposite order, and you get a Japanese sentence. It's not completely like that, but almost. There's one last factor I want to mention which influences word order. And this is that in some languages, question words, words like what or who or how, behave a bit funny. English is actually such a language, so it's easy to demonstrate. I say, John eats rice, we've seen that. So the object typically comes after the verb. But there's an exception. If I ask about an object, if I ask "what does John eat", "what" is no longer there. It's the object, but it's no longer there at the end of the sentence, it now is there at the beginning of the sentence. And all question words in English have this tendency of occurring right there at the beginning of the sentence. "What does John eat?" "Who eats?" "How does John eat?" "Where does John eat?" Et cetera. And English is not alone in this, there's many languages all around the world which do this, which put question words just at the beginning of the sentence. But not all languages do. So some languages just keep those question words in the place where they're supposed to be. So if it's an object, it's in the place that it's supposed to be as an object. "What does John eat" is an English sentence. If we translate it now into Japanese for instance, well we have seen that in Japanese the object comes before the verb, and the subject actually comes before the object. So we have an SOV word order. That doesn't change if you make it a question. So, in Japanese, you say the equivalent of John rice eats, and the equivalent of John what eats? In summary, we have seen that words are like cakes, we can order them in many different ways. And languages explore the possibilities this gives to them and we find many different kinds of orders in many different languages. But we have also seen that typologists have discovered that there are certain correlations between word orders at different levels. So if we have a language where the verb comes before the object, that implies something for the order of adjective and noun. In the next video, I'm going to discuss these issues of word order more with Marten and Inge and they are going to force me to say that things are actually really more subtle than this.