A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of grammatical function assignment

Kempen, Gerard; Harbusch, Karin

doi:10.1515/9783110894028.173

Cited by 47 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…We have shown that part of the variation can be explained by properties of the subject, in line with findings from other languages with (relatively) free word order that inanimate and indefinite subjects are more likely to occur further down the sentence than animate and definite subjects (e.g. Branigan and Feleki 1999;Kempen and Harbusch 2004;Øvrelid 2004;Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000;Van Nice and Dietrich 2003). We specifically investigated bare plural subjects, which typically mark inaccessible entities due to their non-referentiality.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Branigan and Feleki 1999), however, there is a direct relation between the accessibility of concepts and their position in the sentence: the most accessible information is produced first. For example, in languages in which word order is more free, such as German (Kempen and Harbusch 2004), Greek (Branigan and Feleki 1999), Hungarian (É. Kiss 2002), Italian and Spanish (Brunetti 2009), different permutations of the constituents in a sentence are possible, independent of grammatical function.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Vogels

Bergen²

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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Cross-linguistically, both subjects and topical information tend to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subjects are generally highly topical, causing both tendencies to converge on the same word order. However, subjects that lack prototypical topic properties may give rise to an incongruence between the preference to start a sentence with the subject and the preference to start a sentence with the most accessible information. We present a corpus study in which we investigate in what syntactic position (preverbal or postverbal) such low-accessible subjects are typically found in Dutch natural language. We examine the effects of both discourse accessibility (definiteness) and inherent accessibility (animacy). Our results show that definiteness and animacy interact in determining subject position in Dutch. Non-referential (bare) subjects are less likely to occur in preverbal position than definite subjects, and this tendency is reinforced when the subject is inanimate. This suggests that these two properties that make the subject less accessible together can 'gang up' against the subject first preference. The results support a probabilistic multifactorial account of syntactic variation.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Vogels

Bergen²

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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“…Further evidence against encapsulation comes from languages in which word order and grammatical function are not as strongly correlated as in English, showing that conceptual factors influence word order even when grammatical function is controlled for, i.e., speakers prefer conceptually accessible entities preceding less accessible ones, even when these are not assigned higher grammatical functions. Branigan and Feleki (1999) show such effects for Greek, Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000) for Spanish, Kempen and Harbusch (2004) for German, Branigan et al (2008) and Tanaka et al (2011b) for Japanese, and Cai et al (2012) for Chinese. In contrast, Christianson and Ferreira (2005) find that in Odawa, a free word order language, conceptual accessibility influences grammatical function assignment but not word order.…”

Section: Order In Np Conjuncts In Models Of Language Productionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Order in NP conjuncts in spoken English and Japanese

Lohmann¹,

Takada²

2014

Lingua

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In the emerging field of cross-linguistic studies on language production, one particularly interesting line of inquiry is possible differences between English and Japanese in ordering words and phrases. Previous research gives rise to the idea that there is a difference in accessing meaning versus form during linearization between these two languages. This assumption is based on observations of language-specific effects of the length factor on the order of phrases (short-before-long in English, long-before-short in Japanese). We contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of such differences by investigating the variables underlying the internal order of NP conjuncts in spoken English and Japanese. Our quantitative analysis shows that similar influences underlie the ordering process across the two languages. Thus we do not find evidence for the aforementioned difference in accessing meaning versus form with this syntactic phenomenon. With regard to length, Japanese also exhibits a short-before-long preference. However, this tendency is significantly weaker in Japanese than in English, which we explain through an attenuating influence of the typical Japanese phrase structure pattern on the universal effect of short phrases being more accessible. We propose that a similar interaction between entrenched long-before-short schemas and universal accessibility effects is responsible for the varying effects of length in Japanese.

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“…The template in (8) is to be read as follows: the basic order within the middlefield is pronominal arguments before nonpronominal arguments, with the internal order as indicated; the arrows show certain reorderings which are licensed by information-structural and lexical-semantic properties (see also Kempen and Harbusch, 2004). Overall, the corpus study by Hoberg (1981) and the corpus study by Kempen and Harbusch (2005) show a high degree of similarity both with respect to the data and with respect to the word-order rules derived from them.…”

Section: Prior Corpus Studies Of Word Order Variation In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word order in German: A corpus study

Bader

Häussler

2010

Lingua

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This paper presents a corpus study of the order between subject and object in German main and embedded clauses. Since prior studies have shown that object-subject (OS) sentences are rare in comparison to subject-object (SO) sentences, for both main and embedded clauses two corpora were assembled: One corpus containing both SO and OS sentences, and a second corpus containing only OS sentences. In accordance with prior work, the rate of OS sentences was low, but the construction of a corpus restricted to OS-sentences still allowed a statistical analysis of OS-sentences. For embedded clauses, the main results of the current corpus study are: (i) Accusative objects predominate in SOsentences but dative objects in OS-sentences. (ii) The use of OS order is tied to lexical-semantic properties of verbs and their arguments. OS order occurs mainly when the subject is inanimate and the object animate. The verbs used in OS-sentences are mainly ditransitive verbs in the passive voice and unaccusative verbs. (iii) Weight had no significant effect on order. For main clauses with either subject or object in the prefield somewhat different results were found. Following the presentation of the corpus results, we discuss how they fit into current conceptions of word-order variation.

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A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of grammatical function assignment

Cited by 47 publications

References 8 publications

Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Order in NP conjuncts in spoken English and Japanese

Word order in German: A corpus study

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