Syntactic properties of the Russian enclitic že: Corpus-based and experimental approaches.

In this paper, we analyze syntactic properties of the Russian enclitic particle že relying on corpus and experimental data. In Old Russian, the position of this enclitic obeyed Wackernagel’s law in its strict version, but subsequently some variation became possible. We aim to identify possible and preferable positions of že, various factors influencing them, and diachronic tendencies using the National Russian corpus and an experiment. Our goal is not only to examine a particular linguistic phenomenon, but also to show that corpus and experimental methods can be fruitfully combined.