On word order variation and informationstructure in peninsular spanish and italian ‘why’-interrogatives

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

Word-order variation in a contact setting: A corpus-based investigation of Russian spoken in Daghestan

This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

Pre- and postnominal onymic genitives in (Early) New High German

This empirical study focuses on the diachrony of adnominal genitives of proper names in (Early) New High German (17th to 19th centuries), e.g., Carls Haus vs. das Haus Carls ‘Carl’s house’. Starting from the observation that word order variation exists within the whole period investigated, the study identifies determining factors for this variation and weights them in a multifactorial model of word order variation and change, the first time this has been done for German. The focus is on formal factors such as syntactic complexity, a factor that increases in importance over the observed time span. The historical data allow not only the investigation of established formal parameters but also the identification of new factors such as the type of inflectional marker (due to genitive allomorphy in older stages of German). In addition to these formal factors, genitive semantics, pragmatic information status and genre are also taken into account. Explanations for the trend towards the postnominal position of complex adnominal genitives as well as the stability of bare name possessors in the prenominal position are discussed.

Mind your weight: ‘Motionlessly’ sitting between the object and the verb in Japanese

The object in Japanese is often displaced from its canonical position next to the sentence-final verb, due to motivations such as information structure or animacy. Such flexibility allows for an adverb to be placed between the object and the verb. In the literature, there are suggestions for an almost equal preference to place Japanese manner adverbs before or after the object, inferred from both online and offline results. We will present a corpus study with a representative Japanese manner adverb zitto ‘motionlessly’ to show that either order may be preferred in different accounts of word order variation, but none can satisfy both requirements of distance minimization and accessibility, which are manifested in competing directions in Japanese, a verb-final language. In both accounts, weight has immense effect and should not be neglected. By using two heuristic methods to measure the weight effect, we propose that this case study with an object and an adverb sheds new light on the explanatory power of the distance minimization account, in particular by the Mimimize Domains principle (Hawkins 1994), which operates at both levels of (1) the constituency construction of the full VP, which favors the object-first order, and (2) the Phrasal Combination Domain between the head of object and the verb, which favors the adverb-first order. It is also proposed to implement a complement-and-adjunct distinction in the MiD principle, as a step toward a more effective study method of weight effect which I shall call efficiency profiling.

The effects of information structure in the processing of word order variation in the second language

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish–L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new–given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.