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 rule and "ka". Carney calls such words "exceptions which prove the rule, clearly marked as exotic by the spelling". Three letter rule In English spelling, the three letter rule (or short word rule) is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be function words such as "I", "at", "he", "if", "of", "or", etc. As a consequence of the rule, "content words" tend to have at least three letters. In particular, content words containing fewer than three phonemes may be augmented with letters which are phonetically redundant, such as "ebb, "add, "egg, "inn, "bee, "awe, "buy", "owe", etc. Many content