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Guido Linders, Stefan Schnell, and Balthasar Bickel presented a talk titled "What drives word order in transitive sentences" at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) on the 24th of August 2024. The factors determining the relative order of agentive and patientive arguments in transitive sentences were investigated in corpora from 86 languages. While agentivity is the strongest predictor across language corpora, topicality and expression complexity are likewise relevant factors, particularly in those corpora where agentivity is not the strongest predictor. The study is the first to systematically test for the relevance of a broad range of factors across diverse language corpora that have been considered relevant for the relative position of arguments in the literature.
