Constituent Ordering as Alignment

In Optimality Theory (OT), recent work has been exploring the idea that the order of constituents in syntax is determined by alignment constraints, developed within the theory of Generalized Alignment (see McCarthy and Prince (1993)). Costa (1998) and Samek-Lodovici (1998) present general overviews, and both have specifically argued that OT analyses are superior to proposals expressed in terms of the parameterized “directionality” of movement or ordering. In Korean, the ordering options for major clausal constituents have been explored in Choi (1999) and Lee (1999), who discussed the ordering of a verb’s arguments as an interaction between constraints on canonical ordering (e.g., basic SOV) and constraints on information structure (e.g., topic-prominent informational phrases are initial). In this paper, I will discuss extending the ideas of ordering as alignment into the core clausal syntax, concentrating on the non-phrasal clausal elements.