@inproceedings{hull-dobrovoljc-2025-word,
    title = "Word Order Variation in Spoken and Written Corpora: A Cross-Linguistic Study of {SVO} and Alternative Orders",
    author = {H{\"u}ll, Nives  and
      Dobrovoljc, Kaja},
    editor = "Haji{\v{c}}ov{\'a}, Eva  and
      Kahane, Sylvain",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.depling-1.16/",
    pages = "150--155",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-290-9",
    abstract = "This study investigates word order variation in spoken and written corpora across five Indo-European languages: English, French, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Slovenian, and Spanish. Using Universal Dependencies treebanks, we analyze the distribution of six canonical word orders (SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS). Our results reveal that spoken language consistently exhibits greater word order flexibility than written language. This increased flexibility manifests as a decrease in the dominant SVO pattern and a rise in alternative orders, though the extent of this variation differs across languages. Morphologically rich languages such as Slovenian and Spanish show the most pronounced shifts, while English remains syntactically rigid across modalities. These findings support the claim that modality significantly affects syntactic realizations and highlight the need for typological studies to account for spoken data."
}