Efficient sentence processing significantly affects the position of objects in Russian

Abstract In this article we explore various properties of direct objects in Russian that may condition the preference for a preverbal versus postverbal position of the object, against the general trend towards VO constituent order in Russian. First, we show that a preference for OV over VO order is associated with (in order of increasing effect size) animacy and definiteness of the object, personal pronouns in object function and pronominal object clitics. We argue that the main determining factor is accessibility of the referent. Russian follows the general trend of languages to place constituents conveying more accessible information sentence-initially, regardless of their distance to the verb. This is hypothesized to be efficient from the perspective of incremental speech processing. Likewise, we show that the bias towards a postverbal position of the object phrase is a function of the length of that phrase. This tendency is conditioned by Hawkins’ Minimize Domain Principle, which is assumed to optimize sentence processing. Finally, we report an effect of negation on the preference for OV order, and we provide evidence against the claim that in Russian, word order is employed for the discrimination of subjects from objects if case fails to disambiguate. More generally, we suggest that Russian has no grammatical conventions for word order and is therefore a truly free-word-order language in which the ordering of elements is constrained by cognitive and discourse related factors, not conventionalized in the form of grammatical rules.