Author: Bloom, Douglas B.

Date: Jun 07, 1999

Title: Case Syncretism and Word Order Freezing in the Russian Language

Email: dbbloom@stanfordalumni.org

Remarks: Master's thesis presented to the Linguistics department at
Stanford University

Abstract: It has often been noted in literature on "free" word order
languages such as Hindi and Korean (Mohanan and Mohanan (1994), Lee
(1999)) that, given the proper environment, word order "freezing" can
occur. This phenomenon has been observed in the Russian language when
case morphology cannot be used to distinguish the grammatical roles
of the arguments (Jakobson (1932)). Until recently, however, no
analysis has attempted to explain both the freedom of word order in
these languages while accounting for the existence of fixed word order
constructions. This paper represents an attempt at such an analysis in
Russian. It is shown that the observed freedom of constituent order in
Russian can be accounted for, as in King (1995), through structural
discourse functional positions (topic and focus). It is also shown
that, when case morphology cannot be used to differentiate between the
arguments, word order becomes fixed with the grammatical subject preceding the
object. Furthermore, it is shown that this word order "freezing"
is not the result of a performance effect, but is a syntactic
phenomenon. Finally, a constructive case (Nordlinger 1998) analysis of
Russian word order is presented that can both account for the general
freedom of constituent order in Russian clauses, as well as the fixed
word order observed in clauses in which the grammatical roles of the
arguments are not readily distinguishable through morphology. It
is argued that word order freezing in Russian results from the
inability of constructive case to assign argument functions to nominals whose
case morphology does not clearly indicate its grammatical role.