(no subject)

[superslayer18.livejournal.com]

I have a question about Russian word order. I know what you can say anything in pretty much whatever order you want as long as you use the case system correctly. Russian can be SVO, OVS, OVS etc etc. My question is, which of these is the most commonly used one? I've heard SVO quite a lot, but I've also heard that people speak to English speakers in SVO sometimes because they know that that is what they are most used to, and that will be the best way to be understood. In books for learning Russian, or at least in the ones I have, they use SVO almost exclusively. I don't know if this is to help English speakers get used to Russian or if it is because that is what is actually used a lot.

To piggy-back on this question, are there differences of word order in dialects? For example, is it more common to use SVO in Moscow but SOV in St. Petersburg? What about through the passage of time? Maybe in the 1800s SOV was prevalent and then in the Soviet Union they started using VOS more... These are just made up examples, not anything I've actually heard.

Talk about a loaded question... Thanks in advance to anyone that can quench my curiosity!

Comments

[mithgol.livejournal.com]

Wait, would you deabbreviate this? “V” is probably a “verb”, but the other two letters still leave me confused.

[med99.livejournal.com]

Subject, Verb, Object. Подлежащее, сказуемое, прямое дополнение.

[med99.livejournal.com]

SVO is the "default" in standard language, but the vernacular leans towards SOV, and generally towards placing the verb at the very end of the sentence, eg. "Я видел Ивана", "Я иду в школу" (stylistically neutral) vs. "Я Ивана видел", "Я в школу иду" (colloquial). I haven't noticed any regional differences.

Other word orders are used to convey nuances of meaning, eg. OVS expresses something like "As for O, it is V'd by S", OSV = "What S does with O is to V", VSO is occasionally used in compound sentences to denote a "background" action against which some other event takes place. It's very context-dependent so these are just approximations.

[nymphatacita.livejournal.com]

this makes me happy. SVO and SOV come natural to me, with my base in english and latin. Fluency is still forever away, though...

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

>It's very context-dependent so these are just approximations

Context-dependent they are, but those are quite comprehensive approximations, AFAIC.
No regional differences noticed by this comment-poster, either.

[malaya-zemlya.livejournal.com]

It's genrally SVO, but word order is mostly governed by the topic-comment structure. Since S is normally the topic, these tend to coincide.

[nemica.livejournal.com]

Seldom used forms of word order could sound quite weird for Russians too, something like Yoda speaking. :)