Word Order
Alastair Fowler · 2006
Abstract In English, much of the meaning of a sentence is conveyed through the order of its words. We expect the sequence subject–verb–object as a matter of course: ‘dog bites man’ means something very different from ‘man bites dog’. If you are a native speaker, choosing a word order is not usually regarded as a difficult part of writing. All you need do is read a sentence over and you know at once whether the words follow a natural, idiomatic sequence.