example above were a bare NP (without a determiner), instead of a proper name, there would have been a natural interpretation of the VOS order. Coeur d'Alene Coeur d’Alene is a Salishan language that has VOS as its dominant word order but does use word order to distinguish subject nouns from object nouns or agent nouns from patient nouns. European Portuguese Portuguese is a Western Romance language spoken in many places around the globe: Portugal, Brazil, Macau, etc. The language is split into European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. European Portuguese is said to have a very flexible word order, and one of its grammatical possibilities is VOS. Halkomelem Halkomelem, an aboriginal language in British Columbia, has the same basic characteristics the other Salish languages by being inherently VSO. However, VOS is also sometimes possible. While some speakers do not accept VOS as grammatical, others allow it depending on the context. VOS may occur if there are two direct noun phrases in a clause, and the object is inanimate. Also, VOS is used if the content of the phrase disambiguates the agent from the patient: The sentences below indicate that the object in a VOS sentence in Halkomelem is interpreted in its base position (VSO) for the purposes of binding theory. Italian (special case) Italian is most commonly a SVO language, but inversion can occur. If the subject may appear before the verb, it may appear also after the verb. VSO and VOS order, however, are notably rare, especially the latter. Kaqchikel Kaqchikel is an ergative and head-marking Mayan language in Guatemala. There is no case marking on the subject or the object. Instead, the verb classifies the person and numeric (plural or singular) agreement of the subjects and objects. Kaqchikel's basic structure is VOS, but the language allows for other word orders such as SVO. Since the language is head-marking, a sentence focuses on the subject that is before the verb. A sentence may be either VOS or VSO if switching the subject and the object semantically changes the meaning, but VOS is more common. An example is shown in the table below: Malagasy Malagasy is an Austronesian language that is the national language of Madagascar. It is a classic example of a language that has a fixed VOS structure: This sentence shows the consistency of VOS in Malagasy with transitive verbs: The extraction pattern in Malagasy, in which subjects