The role of prominence scales for the disambiguation of grammatical functions in Russian

Recent studies on Norwegian, German, and English show that the ordering of constituents in transitive sentences depends on their animacy, definiteness, pronominalization and length. It has further been suggested that these properties can be used to predict grammatical functions of NPs. We examine whether these properties play the same role in Russian, a language with a rather free word order and a rich morphologically-marked case system.

In a corpus-based study, we analyzed 300 SVO and 300 OVS sentences taken from a novel and a newspaper. The results suggest that animacy and pronominalization can be used to predict the position of constituents, but not their grammatical functions. When the pre-verbal position coincided with the subject position (SVO), the probability of animate NP to be the subject was the same as its probability to be initialized. Pronominalization was a reliable indicator of subjecthood in SVO sentences but a strong predictor of objecthood in OVS sentences. Thus, when case-marking distinguishes between grammatical functions, word order primarily indicates information structure allowing marked constituents in a marked OVS order. This is not taken into account by approaches that use such properties for the disambiguation of grammatical functions.