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<Paper uid="W04-1911">
  <Title>Word order variation in German main clauses: A corpus analysis</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Discussion and Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We present in this paper a corpus-based study on the linearization of subjects and objects in German main clauses. We examined the extent to which the parameters of givenness, definiteness, and pronominalization influence the ordering of verb complements in German SVO and OVS sentences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In general, our corpus data only support the validity of the ordering principles for SVO sentences: given subjects indeed tend to precede new objects, definite subjects indefinite objects, and pronominalized subjects full NP objects. However, clearly none of the ordering constraints is absolute since the reversed orders were also observed, just not as often. For OVS sentences, our results differed. None of the three basic order patterns for givenness, defniteness, and pronominalization was confirmed: For givenness and pronominalization both orders (given-new and new-given; pronoun-full NP and full NP-pronoun) occurred about equally often.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> For definiteness the basic order preference was reversed (more indefinite-definite than definite-indefinite orders). The fact that in OVS sentences indefinite objects preceded definite subjects more often than the converse, suggests that grammatical functions rather than the linear structure of sentences influence the choice of word order (i.e. subjects are more likely to be definite, regardless of word order). Furthermore, even though both definiteness and pronominalization were correlated with givenness, only the positioning of pronouns before or after the verb was additionally influenced by its information status. Definiteness did not interact with information structure as we would have expected.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In sum, our data indicate that linearization principles are soft constraints, and that a combination of principles rather than one primary constraint impact the choice of word order. The fact, that for canonical SVO sentences cases of reversed basic order patterns (e.g. new sub-ject preceded given object) were observed for all three tested linearization principles, suggests that ordering constraints other than the ones under investigation here influence the linearization of complements. Indeed, in the literature a range of such parameters has been suggested, including animacy and length of complements (Dietrich and Nice (in press); Hawkins (1994)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> A recent Negra corpus study by Kempen and Harbusch (2004), confirmed the direct influence of animacy on linearization in German subordinate clauses. On the other hand, a Negra corpus study by Kurz (2000) found no influence of length on the ordering of subject and object.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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