When producing a sentence, the speaker needs to place words in linear order. We hypothesized the existence of a linearizationprocess, which imposes order on a constituent structure. This structure is assumed to be speci® ed with respect to hierarchial relations between constituentsbut not with respect to word order.We tested this hypothesis in a primed picture description experiment. Speakers o...

A production study is presented that investigates the effects of word order and information structural context on the prosodic realization of declarative sentences in Hindi. Previous work on Hindi intonation has shown that: (i) non-final content words bear rising pitch accents (Moore 1965, Dyrud 2001, Nair 1999); (ii) focused constituents show greater pitch excursion and longer duration and tha...

Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is 'frozen' and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the depe...

The P r o l o g p r o g r a m m i n g l anguage a l lows the u s e r to w r i t e p o w e r f u l p a r s e r s in the fo rm of m e t a m o r p h o s i s g r a m m a r s . H o w e v e r , the m e t a m o r p h o s i s g r a m m a r s , as de f ined by C o l m e r a u e r 2 , h a v e to s p e c i f y s t r i c t l y the o r d e r of t e r m i n a l and n o n t e r m i n a l s y m b o l s . A m o...

Using recently available dependency corpora, we present novel measures of a key quantitative property of language, word order freedom: the extent to which word order in a sentence is free to vary while conveying the same meaning. We discuss two topics. First, we discuss linguistic and statistical issues associated with our measures and with the annotation styles of available corpora. We find th...

I present evidence in this paper for a universal preference for clause-initial adverbial subordinators (subordinate conjunctions marking subordinate clauses) over clause-final subordinators. The evidence cited is based on a database containing word order characteristics for a crosslinguistic sample of 625 languages (cf. Dryer 1989b, 1991, 1992). This preference is somewhat similar to a preferen...

1. Introduction. SVO, SOV, VSO and VOS are all well-attested basic word orders in different languages. It is not clear however how to formally motivate why this type of variation at the base exists. In this paper, I intend to look at unmarked word orders in different languages and explain why there is variation at the base. I will propose an analysis within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolens...

The combination of two existing words is a productive strategy used by speakers to convey new concepts and extend the limits of their vocabulary. In English compounds, the first word or modifier attaches further meaning to the second word or head, thus creating a reference to the intended concept. According to Gagné and Shoben’s (1997) Competition Among Relations In Nominals (CARIN) theory, the...

The ordering of constituents in semi-free word order languages has attracted considerable attention in theoretical linguistics. Three types of models have been proposed to explain word order preferences, based on (a) weighted constraints, (b) Optimality Theory (c) syntactic weight. All three models use grammatical competition to explain the interaction of word order constraints. They rely on in...