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This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

This paper presents experimental data on postverbal argument order in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a verb initial language which according to previous analyses displays verb-agent-patient as its canonical order. The data presented in this paper were obtained in an experiment on interpreting ambiguous sentences. The experiment evaluated hypotheses about the impact of animacy, definiteness, verbal aspect and pragmatic preferences on Yucatec Mayan postverbal orders. The participants of the experiment showed considerable instability in role choice for postverbal arguments, sometimes preferring the agent-patient and sometimes the patient-agent order. The role choice is predominantly determined by pragmatic inferences which are supported by inherent properties of the postverbal NPs like animacy and definiteness.

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