The order of objects in Russian: a corpus study

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a corpus study of the order of direct and indirect objects in ditransitive construc tions in Russian (like Petya dal Mashe yabloko 'Petya gave Masha an apple' or Petya dal yabloko Mashe 'Petya gave an apple to Masha'). This topic has been widely discussed in the literature, but previous hypotheses have been based on individual examples and have never been tested on corpus data. Based on earlier research, we have selec ted parameters that affect the order of the objects, such as the length, depth, animacy and role of individual verbs and statistically tested their real effect on two subsamples: with a dative indirect object and with a prepositional one.