From OVS order to converse structure in Russian and other Slavic languages

This article discusses the linguistic issues involved in so-called OVS sentences (sentences with the word order Object-Verb-Subject). These issues have been raised ever since general linguistic theories (e.g. Greenberg, Chomsky) found OVS sentences problematic. On the basis of Slavic examples from the Amsterdam Slavic Parallel Aligned Corpus it is shown that the presumed problems do not exist in Slavic languages. Instead, a whole series of questions involving socalled converse structure awaits further investigation