Page 37 - English for Writing Research Papers

Chapter 2

Structuring a Sentence: Word Order

Factoids

In Old English, the language spoken in English over 1000 years ago, a word could
be placed almost anywhere in a sentence, and often with no change in meaning.
*****
Word order differs massively from language to language, even to say a simple
concept such as 'I like you': like to me you (Croatian), you like to me (Estonian),
you are liking to me (Irish), I you like (Korean), to me you like (Spanish), you
me I like (Wolof).
*****
The English sentence This is the rat that lives in the house that Jack built
would be rendered in Japanese as: this Jack-built-house live-in-rat is.
*****
Even when expressing extremely basic concepts different languages put the
words in different orders. For example, many languages say men and women ,
but mother and father . However in China, they say father and mother . This
probably has nothing to do with putting one sex in front of another, but simply
that in cases of pairs of words we tend to say the word with the easiest sound

first. This explains why around half the world's languages say black and
white , while the other half say white and black. For English speakers it's eas-
ier to make the sound of b rather than w , for the same reasons a Spanish speak-
ing person says ' b ianco e n egro' rather than 'negro e bianco'.
*****
When we scan results from a search engine, our eye rapidly goes vertically
down the left hand side of the page, before starting again to read horizontally.
This means that you need to think carefully about what grammatical subject

to place at the beginning of the first sentence that begins a new paragraph,
otherwise there is a chance that browsers and readers won’t spot the key infor-
mation that you want to give them.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 17
A. Wallwork, English for Writing Research Papers,
English for Academic Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26094-5_2