the same person with whom is directly conversed, "you." Čo: The "čo" refers to the applied form since it matches the suffix of the first verb, which refers to "her." However, in the sentence, it contributes to no semantic meaning. Cantonese (special cases) Despite being a SVO language, there is evidence to suggest that Cantonese uses VOS word order in some cases, such as in casual speech or relative clauses. Relative clause Unlike English, which places a relative clause (RC) after the head noun that it modifies, Cantonese is very unusual among SVO languages by placing relative clauses before head nouns and by having prenominal relative clauses, which cause a VOS word order, as is seen in most subject-gapped relative clauses. Object-gapped relative clauses do not follow a VOS word order. Subject-gapped RCs and object-gapped RCs in English: Subject-gapped RC: The head noun, "mouse," is placed before the relative clause (postnominal RC) in a subject-gapped RC in English. That is not the case in Cantonese and Mandarin in which head nouns are always placed after the RC (prenominal RC). Object-gapped RC: In object-gapped RCs, the object is placed before the relative clause in English. Example of subject-gapped RC in Cantonese: A subject-gapped RC behaves differently in Cantonese from English by being after the head noun (prenominal RC), which always yields a VOS order. It is extremely rare for SVO languages to adopt a prenominal RC structure. In a sample of 756 languages, only 5 languages have that VOS combinationless than 0.01%), one of which is Cantonese. Casual speech In casual speech, Cantonese-speakers often produce a VOS sentence in answering a question. Example Here is a typical response for a question such as "你食左飯未呀?", which translates to "did you eat yet?" in English. Ch'ol Ch'ol is another ergative Mayan language that is one of the Ch'olan-Tseltalan and has VOS as its basic word order. Subjects, objects, and possessors (nominal arguments) may be omitted. Clemens and Coon propose that the language has three paths that motivate three types of VOS clauses: Subjects contained in the high topic position after the verbs Phonologically-heavy subjects are NP-shifted Bare NP objects undergo prosodic reordering Ch'ol objects in a VOS order are generally not full DPs, or the sentence is ungrammatical. The order is derived as VSO if the object is a full DP, as is shown in the table: If the postverbal argument in the