This article focuses on word order - the order of constituents in the sentence - as one way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The spoken languages of the world have been classified into three, major word-order types: SVO, VSO, and SOV. Greenberg' work (1963) on language typology has been a stimulus to linguistic research on word order. However, since languages change and since the relative position of the elements in a sentence can be determined by syntactic relations, semantic characteristics, or discourse factors, languages have appeared to be sometimes inconsistent with the properties associated with the word-order typology based on the grammatical relation between subject and predicate. Therefore, as linguists have described other word orders, they have also had to investigate and define the relevance of semantic (animate/inanimate, agent/patient) and pragmatic notions (topic/comment) to determine their relevance in the ordering of elements in a specific language.