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
Three-letter acronym Three-letter acronym A three-letter acronym (TLA), or three-letter abbreviation, is an abbreviation, specifically an acronym, alphabetism, or initialism, consisting of three letters. These are usually the initial letters of the words of the phrase abbreviated, and are written in capital letters (upper case); three-letter abbreviations such as "etc." and "Mrs." are not three-letter acronyms, but "TLA" is a TLA (an example of an autological abbreviation). Most three-letter abbreviations are "initialisms": all the letters are pronounced as the names of letters, as in "APA" . Some are acronyms pronounced as a word; computed axial tomography, CAT, is almost always pronounced as