The order of subject, object and verb in Tatyshly Udmurt

Daria Belova, Irina Khomchenkova


Abstract
We conduct a preliminary study of the order of subject (S), object (O), and verb (V) in Tatyshly Udmurt (Finno-Ugric) on the basis of approximately 900 clauses from oral folklore and non-folklore narratives (including contemporary texts and texts recorded earlier) using a gradient approach. We show that the most frequent word orders are SOV, SV, and OV. In full clauses (with both S and O), in folklore texts SOV order (≈ 70%) is followed by OSV order (≈ 15%). In contemporary non-folklore texts, however, SOV order competes with SVO order (50% vs 30%), which may be explained by the influence of Russian. We note that full clauses may differ from clauses with only S or with only O: in contemporary folklore texts VS order is much more frequent in S-only clauses (≈ 23%) than in full ones (≈ 4%), and in contemporary non-folklore texts VO order is more frequent in full clauses (≈ 35%) than in O-only ones (≈ 12%). Moreover, we show that word order can depend on the type of clause. For example, in existential clauses the order is almost always SV, while clauses with verbs of speech often have VS order.
Anthology ID:
2026.fieldmatters-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics
Month:
March
Year:
2026
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Rabat, Morocco
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FieldMatters | WS
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Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
60–65
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.fieldmatters-1.7/
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Cite (ACL):
Daria Belova and Irina Khomchenkova. 2026. The order of subject, object and verb in Tatyshly Udmurt. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics, pages 60–65, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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The order of subject, object and verb in Tatyshly Udmurt (Belova & Khomchenkova, FieldMatters 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.fieldmatters-1.7.pdf