摘要：This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a verb-second language along the same lines as the modern Germanic standard languages, spoken Estonian exhibits much more variation. Our findings lead us to suggest that spoken Estonian patterns with the recently-established class of “verb-third” languages, and that syntactic analyses developed to account for these languages can also account for our spoken Estonian data.
