Lugamun’s typical sentence structure can be described as subject – verb – object (SVO). However, it may be more appropriate to call Lugamun a “SV” language, since subject and verb nearly always occur in this order, but to express the direct object, Lugamun uses a preposition, o. O is called the “object preposition” (or “object marker”). Typically the object preposition follows after the verb, but so do other prepositional phrases.

Both the subject and the complements of prepositions (including the object preposition) are noun phrases or pronouns, which will be described below. The verb phrase will also be described below.

Simple sentences have just a subject and a verb.

Ya nulis. – He/She’s reading.

Prepositional phrases, including the object preposition, are usually placed after the verb.

Mi ama o ti. – I love you.

If a clause has several prepositional phrases, the object preposition is frequently placed first.

Mi li da o buku a Tom. – I gave the book to Tom. / I gave Tom the book.

But other orders are just as fine, though they may be a bit rarer.

Mi li da a Tom o buku. – I gave Tom the book. / I gave the book to Tom.

Note: Among the world’s languages, subject-object-verb (SOV) is somewhat more frequent (41%) than SVO (35%), but both are very common (WALS 81). SVO is used by eight of our ten source languages (all except for Hindi and Japanese) and by most creole languages (APiCS 1), therefore we prefer it. The object preposition (or marker) is taken from Japanese – without it, some sentences could be ambiguous because of spaced compounds and because all of Lugamun’s verbs are also nouns and many words are both nouns and adjectives.