Verb-second in spoken and written Estonian

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