10.304, Disc: Word order in Russian

[LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-10-304. Wed Feb 24 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 10.304, Disc: Word order in Russian

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1)
Date:  Tue, 23 Feb 99 16:27 EST
From:  joel at exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman)
Subject:  Re: Word order in Russian

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Tue, 23 Feb 99 16:27 EST
From:  joel at exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman)
Subject:  Re: Word order in Russian



>Word order in Russian [LINGUIST 10.287]
>
>Many languages allow the scrambling of syntagmatic constituents within a
>sentence, but in many of these languages,  adjectival modifiers cannot be
>separated from the noun phrase they modify. In a grammar book for learners

Russian, some other slavic langauges, Latin, and a few others do allow
adjectives to be separated from the nouns they modify.  (Generally, if
the langauge doesn't have determiners, this sort of scrambling is
possible.) Given the simple sentence:

       ja videl svaju  maSinu
       I  saw   self's car
       I saw my car.

all 24 logical word-order possibilities are grammatical, given the
right information-theoretic environment.  In fact, words can even
scramble out of a clause:

       svaju  on dumajet Sto  ja videl maSinu
       self's he thinks  COMP I  saw   car
       He thinks I saw my car

My PhD dissertation (Syntactic and Paratactic Word Order Effects,
Univ. of Maryland at College Park, 1996) gives a thorough theoretical
treatment of these phenomena, concluding that this sort of scrambling
is different than traditional Movement.  (Words don't obey the usual
isalnd condition; they must "reconstruct"; NPI's can move; idioms can
be broken up.)  I call this M-scrambling, and claim that it results
when the Syntax does not completely order the words of a sentence.

This sort of scrambling is common in spoken Russian (though,
naturally, dialects vary), less common in standard written Russian.

-Joel Hoffman
(joel at exc.com)


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