clausefinal

Clausefinal denotes the placement of the main predicate at the end of a clause. It is a descriptive label used in linguistic typology and grammar to characterize languages with verb-final or head-final word order, especially those described as subject–object–verb (SOV). In clause-final languages, the finite verb or predicate typically occurs last, and grammatical information such as tense, aspect, agreement, mood, and evidentiality is often encoded via suffixes or sentence-ending particles attached to that final element. The exact distribution of clause-final phenomena varies by language, and the term is commonly used to compare languages rather than to posit a single syntactic rule.

In practice, clause-final constructions interact with other features of a language’s morphosyntax. For example, many SOV languages use a complex system of suffixal morphology on the final verb to mark tense, mood, or evidentiality, and some also employ discourse particles at the clause boundary. The concept helps linguists describe patterns of clause structure without prescribing a universal model. Clausefinal is thus a functional description rather than a universal grammatical category, and it appears in descriptive grammars, typological surveys, and corpus annotations.

See also: SOV languages, head-final languages, clause structure, morphosyntax.