Optimizing Structure in Context Scrambling and Information Structure

This dissertation examines the free word order or scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory To overcome the problems raised in single component analyses in explaining word order variation I propose an interface approach in which the constraints from several di erent components of grammar participate compete and interact with one another That is various word orders are considered to be motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic semantic and discourse principles of these languages As the constraints from di erent modules of grammar are highly con icting I utilize Optimality Theory to demonstrate how the constraints interact and resolve con icts among one another In this approach each scrambled variant i e a sentence with a particular word order is conceived of as the optimal output which instantiates the syntactic semantic and discourse contextual information given in the input I rst develop the phrase structural constraints in German and Korean referred to as canon which are responsible for the mapping from the argument structure and grammatical function information to the phrase structure con guration which in turn re ects the surface word order Then I examine the semantic and discourse e ects of scrambling and propose a model of information structure based on the two cross classifying discourse features New and Prom to capture the complex interactions of topic and focus on word order The semantic e ect of speci city is also handled