The clause
A clause organizes a predicate and its participants. A predicate may be a verb, but nominal and other nonverbal predicates occur in many languages. Argument structure concerns what participants a predicate licenses; adjuncts add optional information such as place or time. Begin with overt markers and distribution, then test a translation.
Roles are analyses
“Subject” and “object” are grammatical relations, not simply the first and second nouns or the actor and recipient in a scene. Case, agreement, position and control can provide different clues. Some languages treat the sole participant of an intransitive verb like the agent of a transitive verb; others group it with the patient. WALS describes Tawala verbal agreement as an example of the former pattern. Do not impose one alignment on every ancient language.
Word order
A statement that a language has a dominant subject–object–verb order summarizes a pattern over clauses; it is not an instruction to reorder every inscription. Information structure, genre, focus and clitics can affect placement. In a short or formulaic corpus the dominant order may be difficult to establish at all.
Modern-language examples on this page clarify a linguistic pattern. They do not establish unattested sounds or forms for an ancient language. Follow the cited sources below and keep editorial readings separate from the surviving trace.