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Dieses Kapitel untersucht das Verhältnis von Genitivattributen und Präpositionalattributen mit von im Deutschen datenbasiert. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage danach, unter welchen Bedingungen die beiden Konstruktionen miteinander variieren können. Neben funktionaler Äquivalenz, die z. B. bei von-Attributen mit starker lokativischer oder ablativischer Semantik nicht gegeben ist, stellt dabei auch das Vorhandensein flektierender Elemente in der Attributsphase eine wichtige Voraussetzung dar.
Dieses Kapitel untersucht die Stellung adnominaler Genitive im Deutschen. Die Stellungsvariation besteht fast ausschließlich für artikellose Eigennamen, weshalb diese im Zentrum der Analyse stehen. Auf Basis von Korpusdaten kann gezeigt werden, dass die Faktoren Belebtheit und Länge des Attributs sowie Kasus der Gesamtphrase einen großen Teil der Variation erklären.
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the relationship between the subject preference in the resolution of subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses and semantic word order constraints (i.e., prominence hierarchies relating to the specificity/referentiality of noun phrases, case assignment and thematic role assignment). Our central research question concerned the timecourse with which prominence information is used and particularly whether it modulates the subject preference. In both experiments, we replicated previous findings of reanalysis effects for object-initial structures. Our findings further suggest that noun phrase prominence does not alter initial parsing strategies (viz., the subject preference), but rather modulates the ease of later reanalysis processes. In Experiment 1, the object case assigned by the verb did not affect the ease of reanalysis. However, the syntactic reanalysis was rendered more difficult when the order of the two arguments violated the specificity/referentiality hierarchy. Experiment 2 revealed that the initial subject preference also holds for verbs favoring an object-initial base order (i.e., dative object-experiencer verbs). However, the advantage for subject-initial sentences is neutralized in relatively late processing stages when the thematic role hierarchy and the specificity hierarchy converge to promote scrambling.
The present chapter investigates the relative order of attributive adjectives in German. Based on corpus data, our results corroborate previous findings that semantics is the most important factor in accounting for adjective order. Going beyond previous studies, we also consider coordinated structures (such as mit [[großem, verwildertem] Garten] ‘with (a) large, overgrown garden’), where both adjectives are of equal rank. While adjective order in embedded structures (mit [ schwierigem [ familiärem Hintergrund ]] ‘with (a) difficult domestic background’) can be predicted rather accurately on semantic grounds, we show that predictions can also be made for coordinated structures, albeit with lower accuracy. Using regression analysis, we examine how semantic factors interact with a number of other explanatory variables.
The following paper is aimed to demonstrate that a grammar from above („Grammatik von oben“), i.e. a top-down grammar is better suited for the purposes of contrastive linguistic descriptions than the contrary approach, i.e. a bottom-up grammar. Furthermore, it will be argued that sentences should be understood and explained from a textual point of view.
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that–despite differences in the way information is expressed–there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways.