Russian Word Order

Language is used for more than communication of referential information. Grammar serves to fulfill communicative needs as well as to express propositional content directly. In order to be effective, verbal communication must be appropriate, selective, and expressive. Therefore, language must provide the speaker with ways to express ideas effectively: to focus the listener's attention on certain parts of the message while downgrading others; to account for his prior knowledge and expectations; to distinguish between old and new information; to take shared information into account. The grammar of a language must provide the means whereby the speaker can program his message for maximal effectiveness and intelligibility.1 This view of grammar allows us to examine word order not simply as a linear arrangement of elements, but also as a device for guiding the listener through the message. In a language such as Russian, where grammatical relations are expressed by morphological markers, word order is freed for these purposes, as opposed to English where the relatively fixed word order serves to mark grammatical relations.2 Since Russian and English word order differ in such a fundamental way, the mastery of the former presents a problem to English speakers, yet an overwhelming majority of Russian language textbooks do not address the problem adequately.3 In order to understand the nature of the difficulty English speakers experience with Russian word order, it is necessary to examine some of the uses to which it is put. Although the position of a word in a sentence does not necessarily denote its grammatical function, there are many sentences in Russian where word order marks grammatical relations: Tovaris'am xotelos' pomogat' Petru 'The comrades wanted to help Peter' and Petru xotelos' pomogat' tovari''am 'Peter wanted to help his comrades'; Mat' ijubit doe' 'The mother loves the daughter' and Doc' liubit mat' 'The daughter loves the mother'; Ja znaju professora brata 'I know the professor of my brother' and Ja znaju brata professora 'I know the brother of the professor.' Word order is recruited in these sentences to encode underlying phrase marker constituency which the morphology marks ambiguously. The speaker typically assumes that some of the information is new to

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• Sentence comprehension in heritage language

  Open Access•Anna Chrabaszcz, Elena Onischik et al.•Second language Research•2021

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