Thematic Asymmetries Do Matter! A Corpus Study of German Word Order

Abstract

This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

Constraints on Argument Linearization in German

“…For the remaining 171 examples with an animate object and an inanimate subject, both occurring within the middle field, 23% of the sentences occurred with OS order and 77% with SO order. For a set of 82 sentences in which both subject and object were animate, a strong SO preference emerged, as in the study of Verhoeven (2015). For sentences with inanimate subject and animate object, the results for the object-experiencer psych verbs clearly differ from the results for the agentive verbs, for which not a single OS sentence was found.…”

“…This was true independently of animacy. In a recent corpus study, Verhoeven (2015) found a moderate preference for middle field-internal OS order for accusative object-experiencer verbs when the object was animate and the subject inanimate. When both were animate, in contrast, a strong preference for SO was observed.…”

“…In the syntactic literature, there is no consensus concerning object-experiencer psych verbs with an accusative object (for comprehensive discussion, see Verhoeven 2015). Whereas some authors treat such verbs on a par with other verbs selecting a direct object (e.g., Vogel & Steinbach 1995;Fanselow 2000), other authors have claimed that accusative object-experiencer verbs are like dative object-experiencer verbs in that OS order is unmarked for them (e.g., Lenerz 1977;Haider & Rosengren 2003).…”

“…As in Verhoeven (2015), all sentences containing a subject or an object pronoun were removed. For the remaining 171 examples with an animate object and an inanimate subject, both occurring within the middle field, 23% of the sentences occurred with OS order and 77% with SO order.…”

Backward binding as a psych effect: A binding illusion?

“…Dative experiencers generally show stronger psych effects than accusative experiencers. For languages such as German and Dutch, this intuition has been supported by empirical findings on experiencer-first effects in Kempen and Harbusch (2003), Haupt et al (2008), Bader and Häussler (2010a), Lamers and de Hoop (2014), Lamers and de Schepper (2010), and Verhoeven (2015). Another type of variation is accusative EO verbs, which appear in different aspectual structures.…”