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<Paper uid="W04-1911">
  <Title>Word order variation in German main clauses: A corpus analysis</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Word order variation has been described in great detail by theoretical linguists. There is, however, also an increasing interest in the topic from both computational linguists and psycholinguists (e.g. Kaiser and Trueswell (submitted); Keller (2000); Kruiff and Duchier (2003); Pechmann et al. (1996); R&amp;quot;oder et al. (2000)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Nevertheless, the empirical resources that researchers can draw from for their studies are still very limited, since only a few studies report on the actual amount of word order variation (see Kempen and Harbusch (2004); Kurz (2000)). This paper therefore presents a corpus study on the linear order of subjects and objects in German, and factors related to the positioning of complements before or after the verb. Our study is also new in that it looks at main clauses rather than the Mittelfeld, for which most ordering principles were originally intended.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> German is a language with a relatively free word order in which the subject usually precedes the object, but can also follow it: In (1), the subject &amp;quot;Turnverein Neur&amp;quot;onnebeck&amp;quot; precedes the object &amp;quot;Fairnesspokal&amp;quot;; in (2) the same object precedes the subject, without changing the original meaning of the sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  The fairness price (ACC) won the club Neur&amp;quot;onnebeck (NOM).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> For a German newspaper corpus, we investigate subject-verb-object (SVO) and objectverb-subject (OVS) sequences, and examine the extent to which certain ordering constraints influence the positioning of verb complements. In particular, we investigate the validity of the well-known constraints to place given before new, definite before indefinite, and pronoun before full noun phrase (NP) complements (cf.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> M&amp;quot;uller (1999); Uszkoreit (1987)) using the Negra corpus (Brants et al., 1999).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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