Word order in German: A corpus study

Abstract

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.

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.…”

Constraints on Argument Linearization in German

“…In all sentences, the subject preceded the object, thus confirming that NOM ACC is ranked above ANI. Given the rareness of examples of this kind, they probably occurred not at all or only with very low frequency in corpora of the sizes investigated by Hoberg (1997) or Bader & Häussler (2010b), resulting in a premature acception of the schema in (26). The ranking of ANI above NOM DAT is already contained within the word order template in (26), for which -as pointed out above -a large body of corpus evidence is available.…”

“…Bader & Häussler (2010b) applied the word order template in (26) to their corpus sample and found that for about 90% of all sentences, order was correctly predicted. The same result was obtained when order was predicted from verb semantics, which roughly corresponds to constraints in terms of thematic roles.…”

“…The same result was obtained when order was predicted from verb semantics, which roughly corresponds to constraints in terms of thematic roles. Bader & Häussler (2010b) could therefore not decide whether word order in the German middle field is determined by animacy or by thematic roles. A possibility not considered by either Hoberg (1997) or Bader & Häussler (2010b) is the intermingling of case constraints and the animacy constraint.…”

“…Bader & Häussler (2010b) could therefore not decide whether word order in the German middle field is determined by animacy or by thematic roles. A possibility not considered by either Hoberg (1997) or Bader & Häussler (2010b) is the intermingling of case constraints and the animacy constraint. This, however, is exactly what our experimental results argue for.…”