Grammatical form and meaning

Transitive verbs	Number of objects
Examples
Monotransitive	One object	I fed the dog.
Ditransitive	Two objects	You lent me a lawnmower.
Tritransitive	Three objects	I'll trade you this bicycle for your binoculars.^[11]
Intransitive verbs	Semantic role of subject	Examples
Unaccusative	Patient	The man stumbled twice, The roof collapsed.
Unergative	Agent	He works in the morning, They lie often.

Ergative^[12] and object-deletion verbs^[13] can be transitive or intransitive, as indicated in the following table:

Transitive	Example
Ergative	The submarine sank the freighter.
Object deletion	We have already eaten dinner.
Intransitive	Example
Ergative	The freighter sank.
Object deletion	We have already eaten.

The distinction drawn here between ergative and object-deletion verbs is based on the role of the subject. The object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.

Objects are distinguished from subjects in the syntactic trees that represent sentence structure. The subject appears (as high or) higher in the syntactic

In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate oranges." The label often includes ergative languages that do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object (AVO) order.

SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 75% of the world's languages.^[3] It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially "obvious" to human psychology.^{[4][dubious – discuss]}
Languages regarded as SVO include: All Bantu languages, Albanian, Arabic dialects, Assyrian, Bosnian, Bulgarian,^{[a 1][5]} Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish (but see below), French, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic (with the V2 restriction), Igbo, Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay (Indonesian, Malaysian), Modern Hebrew, Norwegian (with the V2 restriction), Polish, Portuguese, Quiché, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Russian (but see below), Slovene, Spanish, Swedish (with the V2 restriction), Thai and Lao, Ukrainian (but see below), Vietnamese and Yoruba.
Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.
Subject–verb–object languages almost always place relative clauses after the nouns which they modify and adverbial subordinators before the clause modified, with varieties of Chinese being notable exceptions.
Although some subject–verb–object languages in West Africa, the best known being Ewe, use postpositions in noun phrases, the vast majority of them, such as English, have prepositions. Most subject–verb–object languages place genitives after the noun, but a significant minority, including the postpositional SVO languages of West Africa, the Hmong–Mien languages, some Sino-Tibetan languages, and European languages like Swedish, Danish, Lithuanian and Latvian have prenominal genitives^[6] (as would be expected in an SOV language).
Non-European SVO languages usually have a strong tendency to place adjectives, demonstratives and numerals after the nouns that they modify, but Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian place numerals before nouns, as in English. Some linguists have come to view the numeral as the head in the relationship to fit the rigid right-branching of these languages.^[7]
There is a strong tendency, as in English, for main verbs to be preceded by auxiliaries: I am thinking. He should reconsider.