Production and comprehension in context
The case of word order freezing
Gerlof Bouma | Center for Language and Cognition, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Freezing refers to a loss of word order freedom found across typologically very different languages. It occurs when argument identifying mechanisms such as agreement and case do not sufficiently distinguish verbal arguments. Word order can in such situations be said to be exceptionally used to unambiguously distinguish the arguments. In the optimality-theoretic literature it has been shown that a bidirectional grammar can elegantly capture this word order freezing.
Bidirectional optimality-theoretic grammar, however, does not typically deal well with ambiguity and optionality. This leads to problems in modeling word order, where these two types of variation do appear. In this paper, I will show that by adopting a notion of grammaticality in Optimality Theory we shall call stratified strong bidirectionality and by looking more seriously at the role of the context and argument markedness in comprehension, we can successfully model both word order freezing and word order freedom in bidirectional Optimality Theory.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Gibson, Edward, Steven T. Piantadosi, Kimberly Brink, Leon Bergen, Eunice Lim & Rebecca Saxe
2013.
A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation.
Psychological Science 24:7
► pp. 1079 ff.
Bouma, Gerlof J. & Petra Hendriks
2012.
Partial Word Order Freezing in Dutch.
Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21:1
► pp. 53 ff.
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