This OSF depository contains all data and scripts needed to reproduce the statistical analysis of the following communication:
Da Cunha Y., Chorai I. & Abeillé A. Disentangling function assignment and word order preferences in Modern Greek. Exling Conference. October 17-19 2022 (Université Paris Cité).
Abstract:
Construction alternations are influenced by several conceptualproperties of referents, including animacy or definiteness, knownas “prominence features” (Aissen, 1999; Haspelmath, 2020).However, it remains unclear whether these features influenceconstruction alternations through word order or functionassignment. To disentangle these effects, we conducted aquantitative corpus study in Greek, comparing a word orderalternation (SOV/OVS) and a function assignment alternation(active/passive). We annotated a random sample of 600 sentencesfrom the Corpus of Modern Greek (Arkhangelskiy & Kisilier, 2018)and fitted a Bayesian categorical model to construction(SVO/OVS/passive). We show that animacy and definitenessfeatures have an effect on function assignment, not on worderorder, but we found a short-before-long length effect.