{"title":"SOV in Russian: A corpus study","authors":"Natalia Slioussar, Ilya Makarchuk","doi":"10.1353/jsl.2022.a923076","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<small>abstract</small>\n<p>This paper analyzes the SOV order in Russian. Various hypotheses concerning its distribution have been proposed in previous functional and formal studies, but none of them became widely accepted. We tested these hypotheses on the large \"Taiga\" corpus and found that the main factor that triggers SOV is pronominalization: if the object is pronominal, it is highly likely to be preverbal. The absolute majority of non-pronominal objects follow the verb, although both giveness and contrastive, emphatic or narrow focus increase their (altogether very small) chances to be preverbal. Thus, the factors discussed in many previous studies play a role, but this role is extremely small. We propose a syntactic account to capture different information-structural properties of preverbal objects and the optionality of this construction.</p>","PeriodicalId":52037,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Slavic Linguistics","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Slavic Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jsl.2022.a923076","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
abstract
This paper analyzes the SOV order in Russian. Various hypotheses concerning its distribution have been proposed in previous functional and formal studies, but none of them became widely accepted. We tested these hypotheses on the large "Taiga" corpus and found that the main factor that triggers SOV is pronominalization: if the object is pronominal, it is highly likely to be preverbal. The absolute majority of non-pronominal objects follow the verb, although both giveness and contrastive, emphatic or narrow focus increase their (altogether very small) chances to be preverbal. Thus, the factors discussed in many previous studies play a role, but this role is extremely small. We propose a syntactic account to capture different information-structural properties of preverbal objects and the optionality of this construction.
期刊介绍：
Journal of Slavic Linguistics, or JSL, is the official journal of the Slavic Linguistics Society. JSL publishes research articles and book reviews that address the description and analysis of Slavic languages and that are of general interest to linguists. Published papers deal with any aspect of synchronic or diachronic Slavic linguistics – phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics – which raises substantive problems of broad theoretical concern or proposes significant descriptive generalizations. Comparative studies and formal analyses are also published. Different theoretical orientations are represented in the journal. One volume (two issues) is published per year, ca. 360 pp.
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