5th International Workshop on Constraints and Language Processing

Communication in general requires a process for (a) producing an optimal form given a certain meaning, and recovering that meaning given the optimal form, and (b) arriving at an optimal interpretation given a certain form, and reproducing that form given the optimal interpretation (Blutner et al. 2006). Hence, optimal communication involves more than the sum of two unidirectional processes of optimization. I will discuss this hypothesis for the case of object fronting in Dutch. Object fronting is rare but grammatical in Dutch. Usually, object fronting is considered to be a type of topicalisation. Therefore, we expect object fronting to occur when the object is the topic of the sentence, and since animate noun phrases are better topics than inanimate noun phrases, we can expect object fronting to happen more often when the object is animate. This would explain the speaker’s tendency to start a sentence with an animate noun phrase, irrespective of its grammatical function. But from the hearer’s perspective a fronted object is in fact more easily recognizable as an object when it is inanimate. I will argue that indeed both the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspectives constrain object fronting, and that not only does the speaker take into account the hearer’s perspective, but also the other way around.