A Case Study of a Free Word Order

The paper aims at the investigation of free word order. It concentrates on the relationship between (formal) dependencies and word order. The investigation is performed by means of a semi-automatic application of a method of analysis by reduction to Czech syntactically annotated data. The paper also presents the analysis of introspectively created Czech sentences demonstrating complex phenomena which are not sufficiently represented in the corpus. The focus is on non-projective structures, esp. those connected with the position of clitics in Czech. The freedom of word order is expressed by means of a number of necessary shifts in the process of analysis by reduction. The paper shows that this measure provides a new view of the problem, it is orthogonal to measures reflecting the word order freedom based on a number of non-projective constructions or clitics in a sentence. It also helps to identify language phenomena that generally pose a problem for dependencybased formalisms.