According to Smith (2008), SVO also means that in a simple sentence, the first noun phrase is the subject, and the subsequent predicate includes the verb phrase and may contain an object. This allows English speakers to understand that in the sentence, for instance, "The boy kicked the ball," the "boy" is the subject, and therefore the one doing the kicking, whereas the "ball" is the object being kicked. If someone wrote the sentence, "The ball kicked the boy," the meaning would be reversed somewhat strangely, and "Kicked the ball the boy," would immediately be recognized as a violation of basic syntactical order and read as nonsense.
