Verb-initial word order to derive the structures of verb-initial languages from underlyingly SVO structures, functional linguists would look at how cognitive principles make it possible for languages to have different word orders and why certain word orders are more common, less common, or almost non-existent. Russell Tomlin (in his 1986 paper "Basic word order. Functional principles") argued that there are three cognitively grounded principles which can account for the observed distributions of the frequencies of word order in human languages. The three principles are: Since subjects are generally more likely than objects to be topics and to have animate referents, the topic-first principle
Four-letter word category includes words that are euphemistic evasions of "stronger" words, as well as those that happen to be short and have both an expletive sound to some listeners as well as a sexual or excretory meaning (many also have other, non-vulgar meanings): "" (US), "", "", "" (US), "" (UK, NZ, AUS), "" and "", as several examples. Finally, certain four-lettered terms with limited usage can be considered offensive by some, within the regional dialect in which they are used, such as "" and "mary". Occasionally the phrase "four-letter word" is humorously used to describe common words composed of four