Approaching Word Order in Georgian, Armenian, and Russian: Combining Corpus- and Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Alice Blumenthal-Dramé, Diana Forker, Haykanush Sazhumyan

Abstract:

Armenian, Georgian, and Russian are often described as having “free” word order in combination with a dominant pattern SOV, SVO, or a combination of both. This paper contributes to this debate by approaching word order from two methodological angles: corpus studies and self-paced reading (SPR) experiments, thus targeting both the production and the comprehension of structurally similar sentences in which the object varies along certain parameters known to influence word order. Our corpus results show one consistent production preference across all three languages: heavier objects tend to follow the verb (favoring SVO order), reflecting a “short-before-long” strategy that arguably aids speech planning. In contrast, comprehension as measured through SPR times diverges from corpus-based production trends. In Russian, SVO was both frequent and processed more quickly. In Armenian, reading times were primarily driven by object properties such as animacy, definiteness, and weight. In Georgian, heavier objects led to longer reading times, but the expected interaction with word order did not emerge. These contrasts suggest that in Georgian and Armenian, word order is more flexible than in Russian and has not become a structurally entrenched pattern that readers rely on during language processing.

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