Word Order in German: A Formal Dependency Grammar Using a Topological Hierarchy

Word Order in German: A Formal Dependency Grammar Using a Topological Hierarchy Kim Gerdes Lattice, Université Paris 7 75251 Paris Cedex 05 France kim@linguist.jussieu.fr Sylvain Kahane Lattice, Université Paris 7 75251 Paris Cedex 05 France sk@ccr.jussieu.fr Abstract This paper proposes a description of German word order including phe- nomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic de- pendency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without re- sorting to movement or similar mechanisms. 1 1 Introduction The aim of this article is to describe the word order of German verbs and their comple- ments. German word order is not free, but based on fairly simple rules, forming what is usually called topological model, which sub- divides the sentence into a hierarchy of topo- logical domains that are themselves composed of fields (Vorfeld, Mittelfeld, right bracket…) (Drach, 1937; Bech, 1955). We start from a syntactic dependency tree, i.e. an unordered tree whose nodes are labeled with the words of the sentence, and whose branches are labeled with syntactic relations among the words (subject, direct object…). The syntactic dependency structure only en- codes subcategorization and modification and must be completed by the communicative structure (partition into theme/rheme, focus…), which plays a fundamental role in word order. It permits us to choose among all the different possible orders corresponding to a given de- pendency structure. In this paper we do not 1 We would like to thank Werner Abraham, Tilman Becker, Ralph Debusmann, Denys Duchier, and Stefan Müller for fruitful discussions. Particular thanks to Igor Mel'cuk for the inspiration of the particular status we give to the phrase structure. pursue this problem any further, but have limited our description to the link between dependency and topology. Note that it is fun- damental to our approach that syntactic structure does not include word order. To get the words in order, we group them in a hierarchy of phrases. The nature and the posi- tion of these phrases are constrained by our topological model. For instance, a non-finite verb can open two kinds of topological phrases, either a phrase, which we call domain, with positions for all of its dependents, or a restricted phrase, which forms the verb cluster, with no positions for dependents other than predicative elements. These two kinds of phrases must be placed in very different topological positions. The fact that we pass through a (topological) phrase structure in order to relate dependency and word order distinguishes our approach from usual dependency grammars (Mel'cuk & Pertsov, 1987; Bröker, 1998; Kahane et al., 1998; Duchier & Debusmann, 2001). The description of German word order closest to our analysis is the HPSG grammar of Kathol (1995; see also Reape 1994), who proposes linearization rules exclusively based on a for- malization of the topological structure. How- ever, as required by the formalism he uses, a regular phrase structure, which we do not need in our analysis, still underlies the structures obtained. Our work constitutes a …

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