Word Order and Constituent Structure in German

Do Heavy-NP Shift Phenomenon and Constituent Ordering in English Cause Sentence Processing Difficulty for EFL Learners?

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

Getting Things Out Of Order. An LFG-Proposal for the Treatment of German Word Order

0. INTRODUCTION 1) One of the most characteristic features of German word order seems to be a contrast between fixed ordering rules concerning the order of verbal elements and a much more variable ordering of their corresponding nominal arguments. As a consequence German word order seems to yield a large number of phenomena that may be classified as 'unbounded' or 'long-distance dependencies', ...

How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses? A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity

Introduction. It is almost a commonplace that word order in the midfield of German clauses is flexible. Although statements to this effect do not claim that “anything goes”, they suggest that word order variability in German clauses is considerably greater than, for example, in Dutch and English. Few systematic empirical studies of the actual amount of variation that go beyond the intuition of ...

A Polynomial Parsing Algorithm for the Topological Model: Synchronizing Constituent and Dependency Grammars, Illustrated by German Word Order Phenomena

Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English

The processing of English noun-noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non-native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non-native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their process...