A Quantitative Model of Word Order and Movement in English, Dutch and German Complement Constructions

A quantitative model of word order and movement in English, Dutch and German complement constructions KARIN HARBUSCH Computer Science Department University of Koblenz-Landau PB 201602, 56016 Koblenz/DE harbusch@uni-koblenz.de GERARD KEMPEN Cognitive Psychology Unit Leiden University, and Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen/NL kempen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl Abstract We present a quantitative model of word order and movement constraints that enables a simple and uniform treatment of a seemingly het- erogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in English, Dutch and German complement con- structions (Wh-extraction, clause union, extraposi- tion, verb clustering, particle movement, etc.). Un- derlying the scheme are central assumptions of the psycholinguistically motivated Performance Gram- mar (PG). Here we describe this formalism in de- clarative terms based on typed feature unification. PG allows a homogenous treatment of both the within- and between-language variations of the or- dering phenomena under discussion, which reduce to different settings of a small number of quantita- tive parameters. 1. Introduction We propose a quantitative model for expressing word order and movement constraints that enables a simple and uniform treatment of a heterogeneous collection of linear ordering phenomena in English, Dutch and German complement structures. Under- lying the scheme are central tenets of the psy- cholinguistically motivated Performance Grammar (PG) formalism, in particular the assumption that linear order is realized at a late stage of the gram- matical encoding process. The model is described here in declarative terms based on typed feature unification. We show that both the within- and be- tween-language variations of the ordering phe- nomena under scrutiny reduce to differences be- tween a few numerical parameters. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we sketch PG's hierarchical structures. Section 3, the kernel of the paper, describes the linearization and movement model. In Section 4, we turn to cen- tral word order phenomena in the three target lan- guages. Section 5, finally, contains some conclu- sions. 2. Hierarchical structure in PG PG's hierarchical structures consist of unordered trees ('mobiles') composed out of elementary build- ing blocks called lexical frames. These are 3-tiered mobiles assembled from branches called segments. The top layer of a frame consists of a single phrasal node (the 'root'; e.g. Sentence, Noun Phrase, ADJectival Phrase, Prepositional Phrase), which is connected to one or more functional nodes in the second layer (e.g., SUBJect, HeaD). At most one exemplar of a functional node is al- lowed in the same frame. Every functional node dominates exactly one phrasal node ('foot') in the third layer, except for HD which immediately dominates a lexical (part-of-speech) node. Each lexical frame is 'anchored' to exactly one lexical item: a lemma (printed below the lexical node serv- ing as the frame's HeaD). A lexical frame encodes the word category (part of speech), subcategoriza- tion features, and morphological diacritics (person, gender, case, etc.) of its lexical anchor (cf. the elementary trees of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG; e.g. Joshi & Schabes, 1997). Associated with every categorial node (i.e., lexical or phrasal node) is a feature matrix, which includes two types of features: agreement …

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