On the persistence of SVO: the case of Modern Eastern Armenian

This study addresses the issue of unmarked word order in Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA), typologically considered a flexible (S)OV language due to its being strongly left-branching as well as the syntactic properties of its VP (focus, bare objects, low adverbs). However, Armenian grammars generally consider (S)VO to be the canonical order. We have conducted a corpus study and two sentence production experiments to tackle this controversy. These studies show that the placement of direct objects (DOs) is mainly triggered by definiteness. While definite DOs are overwhelmingly postverbal, indefinite DOs display a strong preference for preverbal placement. This implies a “typological discrepancy”: although MEA is a strongly left-branching language, the unmarked placement of definite DOs is postverbal. We account for this “discrepancy” based on areal, historical and cognitive factors. Contact with OV languages has resulted in a consistent shift from right to left-branching in Armenian, whereas word order at the clausal level has resisted the shift because MEA makes optimal use of each order in accordance with their cognitive advantages. The evolution of word order in MEA is an illustration of the universal crosslinguistic bias toward SVO.