Harbusch, K.

Kempen, G.

English

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How flexible is constituent order in the midfieldof German subordinate clauses?A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidityGerard Kempen1 and Karin Harbusch21 Psychology Dept., Leiden Univ. & MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen2 Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Koblenz–Landaukempen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl, harbusch@informatik.uni-koblenz.deIt is almost a commonplace that word order in the midfield of German clauses is flexi-ble. Although statements to this effect do not claim that “anything goes”, they suggestthat word order variability in German clauses is considerably greater than, for example,in Dutch and English clauses. Few systematic empirical studies of the actual amount ofvariation that go beyond the intuition of the individual linguist have been published asyet. In the present paper, we adduce empirical data drawn from a corpus study on thelinear order of Subject (SB), Indirect Object (IO) and Direct Object (DO) in Germansubordinate clauses.In recent psycholinguistic work, word order intuitions have been probed in a system-atic fashion. Keller (2000) elicited “gradient grammaticality” judgments via a noveltechnique based on the psychophysical method of Magnitude Estimation (Bard et al.,1996). One of his goals was to assess the relative strength of three well–known NPordering constraints (cf. Uszkoreit, 1987; Pechmann et al., 1996; Mu¨ller, 1999):C1: Pronominal ≺ Non–pronominalC2: Nominative ≺ Non–nominative, andC3: Dative ≺ Accusative(where “≺” means “precedes”). Keller found that C1 and C2 were about equally strongand both stronger than C3. This in contrast with a prediction from Mu¨ller (1999) whoclassified constraint C1 as more powerful than C2 and C3. Most importantly, none ofthe three constraints was “absolute” in the sense that its violation gave rise to an ex-tremely low acceptability/grammaticality judgment (as low as violation of the absoluteverb-final constraint in subordinate clauses did).Our aim was to investigate to what extent informally or formally obtained linguisticgrammaticality judgments are mirrored by the frequency of the various orderings insentence materials generated outside the laboratory.81Recently, the NEGRA–II corpus has become available — a German treebank con-taining about 20,000 newspaper sentences annotated in full syntactic detail (Skutet al., 1997). Using version 2.1 of TIGERSearch (Ko¨nig and Lezius, 2000), we ex-tracted all finite clauses introduced by a subordinating conjunction and containing an(SB,IO) and/or and (SB,DO) pair, possibly with an additional (IO,DO) pair (with themembers of a pair occurring in any order). As for terminology, clauses containingonly an (SB,IO) pair are labeled intransitive; clauses with only an (SB,DO) pair aremonotransitive; a clause with an (SB,IO) as well as an (IO,DO) pair is ditransitive;both latter types of clauses are called transitive. We found 907 monotransitive, 99 in-transitive, and 54 ditransitive subclauses meeting the requirements. We distinguishedsix types of pronominal and full (non–pronominal) NPs: SBpro, SBful, IOpro, IOful,DOpro and DOful. An NP is pronominal iff it consists of a personal or a reflexivepronoun. As a clause contains at most one token of each of the three types of gram-matical function, there are 12 possible unordered pairs of NPs: three combinations ofgrammatical functions ((SB,IO), (SB,DO) and (IO,DO)) times four combinations ofNP shapes (all pronominal, one member full, the other member full, all full). For eachof these, we determined the frequency of the two possible orderings (i.e., of 24 orderedpairs).There were 1168 ordered pairs: one from each mono– or intransitive clause; threefrom every ditransitive clause (Table 1). The first thing to be noted is the high pro-portion of (almost) empty cells. This suggests that grammaticality judgments tend tobe more lenient than frequencies: Quite a few orderings that are rated at least averagein quality, do not occur in actual practice. Stated differently, the actually observableorderings cluster in the upper regions of the grammaticality spectrum. Consequently,the level of flexibility emerging from the frequency counts is considerably lower thangrammaticality intuitions suggest. The ordering of the pronominal constituents isinvariably SBpro—DOpro—IOpro, and SB is the only full NP that may precede apronominal NP; and SBful never interrupts a sequence of pronominal constituents.Variability within full NPs is somewhat greater: While SBful—IOful—DOful is thepredominant order, inversions do occur regularly. Closer inspection of the data re-veals, however, that the inverted order IOful—SBful is restricted to clauses with in-transitive verbs (more precisely, “experiencer–object” verbs as in daß [dem Jungen]IOetwasSB widerfa¨hrt, ’that [the boy] something happens–to’; that something happens tothe boy), and that the sequence DOful—IOful only occurs as standard order licensedby special ditransitive verbs (cf. jemandenDO [einer Pru¨fung]IO unterziehen, ’someone[a test] subject–to’; subject someone to a test). Furthermore, grammaticality ratingsand frequencies are correlated insofar as the best rated ordering of the members of aconstituent pair also tends to be the most frequent one.The frequency data can be accounted for by the rather rigid rule schema in Figure 1.To each individual constituent, the schema assigns a standard (“primary”) position be-fore or after its clausemates. Each of the full NPs has a single “secondary” placementoption, which is indicated by the labeled arrows. This is “freedom in restraint”, con-82Table 1: Frequency of the 24 ordered pairs of grammatical functions in clauses ex-tracted from the NEGRA–II corpus. Dark gray cells represent impossible constituentpairs.Second NPTotalSBpro DOpro IOpro SBful IOful DOfulFirst NPSBpro 53 17 21 246 337DOpro 0 1 120 10 131IOpro 0 0 29 31 60SBful 63 7 59 478 607IOful 0 0 20 9 29DOful 0 0 1 3 4Total 0 116 25 170 93 764 1168SBpro — DOpro — IOpro — SBful — IOful — DOful­ ª­ ª­ ª6666Clause type: Transitive Intransitive DitransitiveFigure 1: Rule schema representing the linearization options observed in the treebankin clauses headed by a mono–, di–, or intransitive head verb.ditional upon mono–, di–, or intransitivity of the head verb. Mild conceptual factorssuch as animacy (Kempen and Harbusch, 2004a), definiteness (Kurz, 2000) and ref-erential ease (yielding short and simple NPs; Hawkins, 1994; Wasow, 2002; Kempenand Harbusch, 2004b) enable full constituents to occupy the secondary, more leftwardposition. Since the schema only generates orderings that tend to elicit (relatively) highgrammaticality ratings, it seems reasonable to view it as representing all and only theunmarked orderings. Presumably, the constraints imposed by the schema can onlybe overruled by strong conceptual influences related to, e.g., topic/focus relationshipsor complex reference, thereby giving rise to marked (“tertiary”) ordering patterns notcovered by the schema. However, this will be a relatively rare occasion. (One shouldkeep in mind that the conclusions drawn so far have emerged from a relatively smallcorpus and need cross–checking against a larger and more varied collection of texts.)If a rule schema such as the one in Figure 1 indeed underlies ordering decisions in sub-ordinate clauses, this would explain why none of the three above constraints deservesthe epitheton “absolute” or “hard” (Keller, 2000): The schema includes systematic ex-ceptions of each of them. In case of a pronominal DO, for example, SBful violatesConstraint C1 (Pronominal ≺ Non–pronominal) if it selects its secondary option; if itopts for its primary position, C2 (Nominative ≺ Non–nominative) is violated; and C3(Dative ≺ Accusative) does not apply at all, irrespective whether IO is pronominal orfull.83The schema in Figure 1 is more successful because it considers grammatical functionand syntactic shape simultaneously. An important additional advantage of the ruleschema is that it enables grammatical constituents to select their primary or secondaryslot on a first-come first-serve basis, without the need to take properties of clausematesinto account. This is because the schema allots absolute rather than relative positions.Certain recent approaches to linearization make use of so–called topological fields(see Kathol (2000) in particular). In our work on the Performance Grammar formal-ism (Harbusch and Kempen, 2002; Kempen and Harbusch, 2002), we have proposed“topologies” for German clauses that consist of nine ordered slots:F1 M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 E1 E2The slot labeled F1 makes up the forefield (from German Vorfeld); the slots M1through M6 belong to the midfield (Mittelfeld); E1 and E2 define the endfield (Nach-feld). To–be–ordered constituents select a slot depending on their grammatical func-tion and syntactic properties. For instance, slot M1 serves as the “landing site” for thefinite verb of main clauses. In subordinate clauses, M1 is occupied by the subordinat-ing conjunction (if present), while the finite verb goes to M6; and M2 and M3 eachcan accommodate one or more non-Wh argument NPs.How can we fit the six–slot rule schema of Figure 1 into the nine–slot clausal topol-ogy? Somewhat arbitrarily, and in order to avoid inconsistency with some earlier pub-lications, we propose to divide slots M2 and M3 into three subslots. This yields sixreceptacles — one for each of the six NP types of the rule schema (see Figure 2).F1 M1 M2.1 M2.3 M2.3 M3.1 M3.2 M3.3SBpro DOpro IOpro SBful IOfull DOfull⇓ ⇓ ⇓ ⇓ ⇓ ⇓M4 M5 M6 E1 E2® »»»9XXXz? XXXz»»»9Figure 2: Mapping of argument NP types onto midfield (sub)slots. Double arrows:primary placement options; single arrows: secondary options.The corpus frequencies we observed seem to originate from more complex and lessflexible linearization constraints than is standardly assumed. The constraints do notinvolve single features such as exemplified by C1 through C3 above but combinationsof features, in particular grammatical function and syntactic shape. Furthermore, theconstraints suggest a linearization system where individual constituents receive abso-lute rather than relative positions. The corpus data may thus provide indirect supportfor recent “topological” approaches to linear order in linguistics and psycholinguistics.ReferencesBard, E., D. G., Robertson, and A. Sorace (1996). Magnitude estimation of linguisticacceptability. Language, 72:32–68.84Harbusch, K. and G. Kempen (2002). A quantitative model of word order and move-ment in English, Dutch and German complement constructions. In Procs. of the19th COLING-2002. Taipei, Taiwan.Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, U.K.Kathol, A. (2000). Linear Syntax. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.Keller, F. (2000). Gradience in grammar: Experimental and computational aspects ofdegrees of grammaticality. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Edinburgh, U.K.Kempen, G. and K. Harbusch (2002). Performance Grammar: A declarative definition.In A. Nijholt, M. Theune, and H. Hondorp, eds., Computational Linguistics in theNetherlands 2001. Rodopi, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and New York, NY.Kempen, G. and K. Harbusch (2004a). A corpus study into word order variation inGerman subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of gram-matical function assignment. In T. Pechmann and C. Habel, eds., Multidisciplinaryapproaches to language production. Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin.Kempen, G. and K. Harbusch (2004b). Generating natural word orders in a semi–freeword order language: Treebank–based linearization preferences for argument NPsin subordinate clauses of German. In A. Gelbukh, ed., Procs. of the Fifth CICLING,Seoul, Korea; Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin.Ko¨nig, E. and W. Lezius (2000). A description language for syntactically annotatedcorpora. In Procs. of the 18th COLING, Saarbru¨cken.Kurz, D. (2000). A statistical account on word order variation in German. InA. Abeille´, T. Brants, and H. Uszkoreit, eds., Procs. of the COLING Workshop onLinguistically Interpreted Corpora, Luxembourg.Mu¨ller, G. (1999). Optimality, markedness, and word order in German. Linguistics,37:777–815.Pechmann, T., H. Uszkoreit, J. Engelkamp, and D. Zerbst (1996). Wortstellung imdeutschen Mittelfeld. Linguistische Theorie und psycholinguistische Evidenz. InPerspektiven der Kognitiven Linguistik. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden.Skut, W., B. Krenn, T. Brants, and H. Uszkoreit (1997). An annotation scheme for freeword order languages. In Procs. of the Fifth ANLP, Washington D.C.Uszkoreit, H. (1987). Word Order and Constituent Structure in German. CSLI Publi-cation, Stanford, CA.Wasow, T. (2002). Postverbal behavior. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.85

How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses?: A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity

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How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses?: A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity

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