Optionality and preferences in Spanish postverbal constituent order: An OT account without basic constituent order: an OT account without basic constituent order

• Steffen Heidinge ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Graz

     University of Graz

     Graz, Austria

     
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 162, 2015, págs. 102-127
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In Spanish, several constituents have their unmarked position after the sentence's main verb (direct objects, locative adjuncts, depictives, etc.). The linearity of linguistic expressions implies that if two such postverbal constituents appear in a given sentence they must be ordered in a certain way. The present paper examines information focus and syntactic weight as possible factors in postverbal constituent order. Based on data from two experimental studies it will be shown that (i) these factors indeed play a role in postverbal constituent order in Spanish and that (ii) postverbal constituent order is characterized at the same time by optionality and preferences (e.g., although a direct object (dO) and a depictive (DEP) can be ordered as DEP-dO or dO-DEP, the order dO-DEP is clearly preferred over DEP-dO). To account for the optionality and preferences, the data will be modeled in a (simplified) Stochastic Optimality Theory grammar without assuming a basic constituent order.