АКЦИЯ!!!

The syntactic structure of a language imposes restrictions on the way messages may be organized in that language. The order in which functional elements such as subject, predicator, and object may occur is more fixed in some languages than in others.18 Languages vary in the extent to which they rely on word order to signal the relationship between elements in the clause. Compared to languages such as German, Russian, Finnish, Arabic, and Eskimo, word order in English is relatively fixed. The meaning of a sentence in English, and in languages with similarly fixed word order such as Chinese, often depends entirely on the order in which the elements are placed (cf. The man ate the fish and The fish ate the man). Some languages have case inflections which indicate the relation¬ship between the elements in a clause, for instance who does what to whom. In such languages, the form of a noun changes depending on its function in the clause. In Russian, both Ivan videl Borisa and Borisa videl Ivan mean 'John saw Boris', because -a marks Boris as the object, regardless of its position with respect to the subject and verb.