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.