The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: An overwhelming majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.
Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we know that the language is strict accusative SVO, then we know that Grob smock Blug probably means that Grob is the smocker and Blug the entity smocked. However, since very strict word order is rare in practice, such applications of word order studies are rarely effective.[citation needed]
Main articles: Branching (linguistics) and Head directionality parameter
The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun
· adjective (red house vs house red)
· determiner (this house vs house this)
· numeral (two houses vs houses two)
· possessor (my house vs house my)
· relative clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)
Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides).
There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For SVO languages, either order is common.
For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after their heads, such as "extraordinaire", which kept its position when it was borrowed from French.)
Some languages do not have a fixed word order. In these languages there is often a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments; however there are also languages in which word order is fixed even though the degree of marking would enable free word order, and languages with free word order, such as some varieties of Datooga, which have free word order combined with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments. Typologically there is a trend that highly animate actors are more likely to be topical than low-animate undergoers, this trend would come through even in free-word-order languages giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS in the case of ergative systems, however ergative systems do not usually extend to the highest levels of animacy, usually giving way to some form of nominative system at least in the pronominal system)[8]. Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders such as Latin, Hungarian, Russian (in intransitive clauses), and Finnish. In some of those, a canonical order can still be identified, but in others this is not possible.[citation needed]
o Armenian
In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions. However, most languages are generally assumed to have a basic word order, called the unmarked word order; other, marked word orders can then be used to emphasize a sentence element, to indicate modality (such as an interrogative modality), or for other purposes.
For example, English is SVO (subject-verb-object), as in "I don't know this", but OSV is also possible: "This I don't know." This process is called topic-fronting (or topicalization) and is common. In English, OSV is a marked word order because it emphasises the object, and is often accompanied by a change in intonation.
An example of OSV being used for emphasis:
A: I can't see Alice. (SVO)
B: What about Bill?
A: Bill I can see. (OSV, rather than I can see Bill, SVO)
Non-standard word orders are also found in poetry in English, as well as in many other languages.
In meteorology, an inversion is a deviation from the normal change of an atmospheric property with altitude. It almost always refers to a temperature inversion, i.e., an increase in temperature with height, or to the layer (inversion layer) within which such an increase occurs.
An inversion can lead to pollution such as smog being trapped close to the ground, with possible adverse effects on health. An inversion can also suppress convection by acting as a "cap". If this cap is broken for any of several reasons, convection of any moisture present can then erupt into violent thunderstorms. Temperature inversion can notoriously result in freezing rain in cold climates.
Usually, within the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) the air near the surface of the Earth is warmer than the air above it, largely because the atmosphere is heated from below as solar radiation warms the Earth's surface, which in turn then warms the layer of the atmosphere directly above it e.g. by thermals (convective heat transfer).
Under certain conditions, the normal vertical temperature gradient is inverted such that the air is colder near the surface of the Earth. This can occur when, for example, a warmer, less dense air mass moves over a cooler, denser air mass. This type of inversion occurs in the vicinity of warm fronts, and also in areas of oceanic upwelling such as along the California coast. With sufficient humidity in the cooler layer, fog is typically present below the inversion cap. An inversion is also produced whenever radiation from the surface of the earth exceeds the amount of radiation received from the sun, which commonly occurs at night, or during the winter when the angle of the sun is very low in the sky. This effect is virtually confined to land regions as the ocean retains heat far longer. In the polar regions during winter, inversions are nearly always present over land.
A warmer air mass moving over a cooler one can "shut off" any convection which may be present in the cooler air mass. This is known as a capping inversion. However, if this cap is broken, either by extreme convection overcoming the cap, or by the lifting effect of a front or a mountain range, the sudden release of bottled-up convective energy — like the bursting of a balloon — can result in severe thunderstorms. Such capping inversions typically precede the development of tornadoes in the midwestern United States. In this instance, the "cooler" layer is actually quite warm, but is still denser and usually cooler than the lower part of the inversion layer capping it.
An inversion can develop aloft as a result of air gradually sinking over a wide area and being warmed by adiabatic compression, usually associated with subtropical high pressure areas. A stable marine layer may then develop over the ocean as a result. As this layer moves over progressively warmer waters, however, turbulence within the marine layer can gradually lift the inversion layer to higher altitudes, and eventually, even pierce it, producing thunderstorms, and under the right circumstances, leading to tropical cyclones. The accumulated smog and dust under the inversion quickly taints the sky reddish, easily seen on sunny days.
With the ceasing of convection, which is normally present in the atmosphere, a number of phenomena are associated with a temperature inversion. The air becomes stiller, hence the air becomes murky because dust and pollutants are no longer lifted from the surface.
This can become a problem in cities where many pollutants exist. Inversion effects occur frequently in big cities such as Mumbai, India; Los Angeles, California; Mexico City ; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; and Tehran, Iran, but also in smaller cities like Oslo, Norway, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Boise, Idaho, which are closely surrounded by hills and mountains that together with the inversion effect bottle-caps the air in the city. During a severe inversion, trapped air pollutants form a brownish haze that can cause respiratory problems. The Great Smog, one of the most serious examples of such an inversion, occurred in London in 1952 and was blamed for thousands of deaths.
Sometimes the inversion layer is higher so that the cumulus clouds can condense but then they spread out under the inversion layer. This cuts out sunlight to the ground and prevents new thermals from forming. A period of cloudiness is followed by sunny weather as the clouds disperse. This cycle can occur more than once in a day.
The index of refraction of air decreases as the air temperature increases, a side effect of hotter air being less dense. Normally this results in distant objects being shortened vertically, an effect that is easy to see at sunset (where the sun is "squished" into an oval). In an inversion the normal pattern is reversed, and distant objects are instead stretched out or appear to be above the horizon. This leads to the interesting optical effects of Fata Morgana or mirage.
Similarly, very-high frequency (VHF - 30 to 300 MHz) radio waves (being part of the electromagnetic spectrum, like light) can be refracted by such inversions. This is why it is possible to sometimes hear FM radio (or watch VHF-LO band TV) broadcasts from otherwise impossible distances as far as a few hundred miles distant on foggy nights. The signal, still powerful enough to be received even at hundreds or rarely, thousands, of miles, would normally be refracted up and away from the ground-based antenna, is instead refracted down towards the earth by the temperature-inversion boundary layer. This phenomenon is called tropospheric ducting. It is also referred to as skip by small radio operators and Ham operators. Along coast lines during Autumn and Spring many FM radio stations are plagued by severe signal degradation causing them to sound like "scrambled eggs".
Inversions can magnify the so called "green flash": a phenomenon occurring at sunrise/sunset, usually visible for a few seconds, in which the sun's green light is isolated due to dispersion - the shorter wavelength is refracted most, so it is the first/last light from the upper rim of the solar disc to be seen.
In addition, when an inversion layer is present (for example early in the morning when ground-level air temperatures are cool, and high-level air temperatures are warmer), if a sound or explosion occurs at ground level, the sound wave can get totally reflected from the warmer upper layer (in which the sound travel faster, i.e. the air has lower acoustic refractive index, so the sound can undergo total internal reflection) and return back to ground level; the sound is therefore heard much further than normal. The shockwave from an explosion can be reflected by an inversion layer in much the same way as it bounces off the ground in an air-burst and can cause additional damage as a result. This phenomenon killed three people in the RDS-37 nuclear test.
In an inversion, vertical motion in the atmosphere is suppressed because the atmosphere is stable. Hence vertical heat transport by eddies is suppressed; this reduced (downwards) heat transport leads to further cooling of the lower surface. This can lead to an effective decoupling of the atmosphere from the surface in extreme conditions, such as may be found in Antarctica during the polar night, where inversions greater than 25 °C commonly occur.When it happens the sky is a reddish color.
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