A corpus-based investigation on the distribution of pronominal objects in Russian

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the alternating word order VO and OV in Russian from a diachronic perspective. Literature has argued that Russian, the SVO language, has the pronoun object likely to move to the preverbal position, yielding the SOV order. By controlling some factors affecting occurrences of the VO-OV alternation, the current study examined the corpus data from the 19th and the 21st centuries of Russian. The diachronic corpus study has revealed that the VO alternant was comparable to the OV alternant during the 19th century but has become less frequent in the 21st century. This study suggests that the decrease of the VO alternant can be attributed to some historical changes in the language and the VO alternant as well as the OV alternant requires a structural account.