When grammar-internal factors hinder an OV-to-VO shift

The case of Surgut Khanty

Abstract

Language contact is often argued to lead to word order change – e.g., the OV-to-VO shift. Though the exact mechanism of change is poorly understood, instances of lack of this change, despite the favourable conditions being present (intense contact, dominant bilingualism with a majority VO language, etc.) are worth investigating. In this paper, we present novel data from Surgut Khanty (Ob-Ugric, Uralic) and show how language-internal factors pertaining to information structure (IS) – fusion of grammatical roles and IS-properties, and IS-restrictions on the postverbal domain – govern the distribution of postverbal constituents (PVCs) in an otherwise rather strictly verb-final language. We propose that these factors have so far prevented Surgut Khanty from undergoing an OV-to-VO shift despite intense contact and widespread bilingualism with a dominant VO language, Russian.