The Influence of Animacy, Givenness, and Focus on Object Order in Croatian Ditransitives

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how animacy, givenness, and focus influence object order preference (direct‐indirect, indirect‐direct) in Croatian ditransitive structures. An online survey testing acceptability judgement of four target word orders in various contexts was conducted on 82 native speakers of Croatian. We found that all three factors have an effect on word order preference. The study revealed a preference for DO‐IO orders once animacy was neutralized, and found that focus influences object order more strongly than a simple given/new contrast. The word order with the widest contextual applicability is verb‐direct‐indirect, thus indicating the potential underlying status of this structure.

The order of objects in Russian: a corpus study

“…The role of animacy in ditransitive constructions has been dis cussed in many typological studies (e.g. [14,21,18]) and in corpus and experimental work on individual languages: a corpus study on German [20] or an acceptability judgment study on Croatian [42] can be taken as examples. Faltz [14] explained it by "the greater cognitive salience of the typically animate IO argument over the typically inanimate DO argument" (p. 84).…”