Disentangling word order and function assignment preferences in Modern Greek
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0013/000555Keywords:
Modern Greek, Construction alternations, Corpus study, Bayesian modellingAbstract
Construction alternations are influenced by several conceptual properties of referents, including animacy or definiteness, known as “prominence features” (Aissen 1999, Haspelmath 2020). However, it remains unclear whether these features influence construction alternations through word order or function assignment. To disentangle these effects, we conducted a quantitative corpus study in Greek, comparing a word order alternation (SOV/OVS) and a function assignment alternation (active/passive). We annotated a random sample of 600 sentences from the Corpus of Modern Greek (Arkhangelskiy, Kisilier 2018) and fitted a Bayesian categorical model to construction choice (SOV/OVS/passive). We show that animacy and definiteness features have an effect on function assignment, not on word order, but we found a short-before-long length effect.
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