Word Order in Adjective-Noun Pairs Inside and Outside the Prepositional Phrase: A Contribution to the 15th International Congress of Slavists (Minsk, 2013)

Philip R. Minlos

Word Order in Adjective-Noun Pairs Inside and Outside the Prepositional Phrase: A Contribution to the 15th International Congress of Slavists (Minsk, 2013)

Philip R. Minlos

Abstract

This paper discusses a statistical correlation between possessive prenominal placement and the presence of a preposition. The data from mediaeval Russian, Czech, and Croatian are validated against standard statistical measures (chisquare (X²) test and phi (φ) coefficient). Different explanations for the correlation are proposed; the most natural and simple one links the syntactic feature with the phonetic chunking of preposition and adjacent possessive, strengthened by their frequent co-occurence.

Keywords

syntax; statistical analysis; noun phrase; word order; Old Russian language; Old Czech language; Old Croatian language

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