The Canonical Order of Russian Objects

What is it about?

In a sentence like ‘John gave Mary a book’, the verb ‘to give’ takes two objects – ‘Mary’ and ‘a book’. In Russian, the two objects can appear in any order. However, only one such order can be analysed as canonical or unmarked, with the opposite order being linked to some additional interpretive effect. Only one such interpretation has been discussed in the linguistic literature, namely the one that distinguishes new information from contextually given information. It has been noticed that an object whose referent is already present in the context precedes the object whose referent is not yet given in the context. If this were the only interpretation licensing the non-canonical order of objects, we would expect that when none of objects are given in the context, only the canonical order surfaces. This, however, is not the case. In this paper, I argue that more interpretations that are capable of licensing the non-canonical order of objects must be taken into account. Whenever the construal of objects is identical with respect to all of the interpretations licensing the non-canonical order of objects in Russian, only one order of objects becomes possible, suggesting that this order is canonical.

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Why is it important?

The paper uncovers iterpretations that license reordering of Russian objects and proposes the mechanism of their interaction. By manipulating the construal of objects with respect to all of these interpretations, we establish, what the canonical order of Russian objects is. Moreover, the proposed mechanism of interaction of interpretive features is shown to apply in other languages as well. This allows us to solve problems such as the German 'Indefiniteness Puzzle' without any additional stipulations.

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