Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The aim of this presentation is to investigate theoretical considerations related to reorderings in Germanic languages adopting a quantitative point of view (inspired by Merlo 2016).  The first part of the talk will deal with theoretical insights and predictions provided by the interaction of cartographic maps (Rizzi & Bocci 2017; Schweikert 2005) with phenomena such as German scrambling (see Hinterhölzl 2006), restrictions to movement of constituents (for example the “bottleneck effect”, Haegeman 1997) and standard locality effect following the guidelines of a criterial approach to Verb Second languages (Samo 2019). 

The second part of the talk will present two observational studies involving quantitative data extracted from syntactically annotated corpora (Zeman et al. 2019). The first study focuses on reorderings of constituents in four different treebanks of German, while the second presents further comparative data extracted from other seven Germanic varieties (Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Faroese, Norwegian, Swiss German, Swedish). The results show that the predictive power of cartographic maps and related principles is quantitatively confirmed.

Selected reference

Haegeman, Liliane, 1997. Negative inversion and the structure of CP. Paper presented at the Linguistic Colloquium, University of Wuppertal.

Hinterhölzl, Roland. 2006. Scrambling, remnant movement, and restructuring in West Germanic, [Oxford studies in comparative syntax] Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Merlo, Paola. 2016. Quantitative computational syntax: some initial results. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics, 2(1):11–30.

Rizzi, Luigi, Bocci, Giuliano. 2017. The Left Periphery of the Clause: Primarily Illustrated for Italian. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds) 1-30, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Samo, Giuseppe. 2019. A Criterial approach to the Cartography of V2. John Benjamins Publishing.

Schweikert, Walter 2005. The Order of Prepositional Phrases in the Structure of the Clause. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Zeman, Daniel, Nivre, Joakim, Abrams, Mitchell, et al., 2019, Universal Dependencies 2.5, LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-3105.