Section: New Results

Cross linguistic factors governing word order

Participant : Benoit Crabbé.

In many languages, flexible word order often has a pragmatic role and marks the introduction of new information, a focus or a topic shift. Other cases of language- internal word order variation are alternations between two options such as Mary gave John a book and Mary gave a book to John, which are conditioned on syntactic and semantic factors such as the complexity of the constituents (as in Mary gave John a book she had read ten times), their animacy or the meaning of the verb [52] .

One of the goals of this module is to investigate the connection between the quantitative aspects of word order variation across languages and the quantitative aspects of word order variation within a language. We study the corresponding patterns in language-internal variation by looking at the syntactically annotated corpora of various languages. Focusing on the variation of the internal word order of the noun-phrase as a case study [25] , we explore, in collaboration with Kristina Gulordava (PhD at the University of Geneva, former international visitor at Alpage), to which extent a computational corpus-based analysis can provide new evidence not only for empirical, but also for theoretical linguistic research.