In English, the job of making sense of a sentence is done by the order of the words (see pp. 232 & 235) and by functional words. In many other languages, this job is done by changing the form of words. In English, nouns, adjectives and verbs do not have bits and bobs added to them and their endings changed (inflection: see p. 281) to anywhere near the same extent as in most other languages. Russian nouns, for instance, change according to gender, number and case, whereas English nouns basically only have two forms – singular and plural – and some nouns (e.g., sheep) don’t even have these. Native English speakers intuitively know the case system that remains from, for example, the different pronoun forms for the nominative case (I, he), accusative case (me, him), and genitive case (my, his), but otherwise case is a mystery for those who have never actively studied grammar. Finnish has 15 cases. At the other extreme there is almost no inflection in Chinese; meanings are conveyed through word order, adverbials and context.

The basic word order in English is subject (s), verb (v), object (o): Captopril controls hypertension. The passive voice inverts the order of doer and done-to, but not the order of the grammatical subject and object: Hypertension is controlled by captopril. The phrase by captopril is technically the complement, rather than the object, of the verb. This s-v-o structure is the commonest among all languages, followed by s-o-v (Japanese, Hindi, Korean), and v-s-o (Arabic), which is rare. What is unusual about English is the rigidity of the s-v-o order (which is necessary because of the lack of inflection). Other languages are more flexible, particularly Russian, Finnish and Hungarian, which allow all the combinations.