engleski

Processing SVO and OVS Word Order in Croatian

Croatian is a language with a flexible word order, case-marking, gender-marking and animacy-marking. However, the canonical order is considered to be SVO (Greenberg 1966). While the incremental argument interpretation in transitive structures in Croatian predominately relies on case marking (MacWhinney and Bates 1989), case syncretism can help differentiate the role of morpho- syntactic, semantic and information-structural principles in word ordering. We use temporarily ambiguous input to test the effects of (i) morphological marking vs. sentential position, (ii) animacy, and (iii) givenness in processing SVO and OVS orders. We have conducted 3 self-paced reading experiments followed by acceptability judgement tasks (scale 1-5). Self-paced reading task explores to what extent speakers use sentential position, animacy and givenness to incrementally assign arguments. Acceptability judgment task is used to test the overall preference for (i) S>O, (ii) animate > inanimate and (iii) given information > new information.

Word order ; Croatian ; Animacy ; Givenness

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