Corpus-and Psycholinguistic Investigations of Linguistic Constraints on German Object Order

The aim of this paper is to evaluate several linguistic constraints as predictors of the frequency with which word order variants of double object sentences occur, as well as of the processing ease associated with these structures. We will provide corpus data and behavioural data from completion questionnaires and self-paced reading experiments that address the validity of the Dative constraint, the Animacy constraint, and the Definiteness constraint. Case is found to have an effect on the order of the objects in double object structures. However, this effect cannot be disentangled from an Animacy effect because dative and animacy on the one hand and accusative and inanimacy on the other hand turn out to be strongly associated. Finally, evidence for the validity of the Definiteness constraint is only found in the corpus data extracted from its context but not in the behavioural data gathered without context. German is generally assumed to be a language with a relatively free word order. The acceptability of a given structure is said to depend on the interaction of several linear precedence rules that refer to morphological, semantic, and information structural properties, such as Case, Animacy, Definiteness, Pronominality, and Focus (e.g., Lenerz 1977; Uszkoreit 1986, 1987; Jacobs 1988) (PR: Precedence rule, read < as 'precedes'):