Chapter published in:
Crossroads Semantics: Computation, experiment and grammar
Edited by Hilke Reckman, Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng, Maarten Hijzelendoorn and Rint Sybesma
[Not in series 210] 2017
► pp. 107–123

Chapter 7
Frequential test of (S)OV as unmarked word order in Dutch and German clauses

A serendipitous corpus-linguistic experiment

| Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen | Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University
| Department of Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau

In a paper entitled “Against markedness (and what to replace it with)”, Haspelmath argues “that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous”, and that frequency asymmetries often explain structural (un)markedness asymmetries (Haspelmath 2006). We investigate whether this argument applies to Object and Verb orders in main (VO, marked) and subordinate (OV, unmarked) clauses of spoken and written German and Dutch, using English (without VO/OV alternation) as control. Frequency counts from six treebanks (three languages, two output modalities) do not support Haspelmath’s proposal. However, they reveal an unexpected phenomenon, most prominently in spoken Dutch and German: a small set of extremely high-frequent finite verbs with unspecific meanings populates main clauses much more densely than subordinate clauses. We suggest these verbs accelerate the start-up of grammatical encoding, thus facilitating sentence-initial output fluency.

Keywords: SOV, SVO, markedness, German, Dutch, verb frequency, sentence planning, fluency, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Three frequential tests
  • 4.Discussion: Time and fluency pressures can boost VO:OV ratios
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.210.07kem
References
Beek, Leonoor van der, Gosse Bouma, Robert Malouf & Gertjan van Noord
2002 The Alpino Dependency Treebank. In Tanja Gaustad (ed.), Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2001. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brants, Sabine, Stefanie Dipper, Peter Eisenberg, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Esther König, Wolfgang Lezius, Christian Rohrer, George Smith & Hans Uszkoreit
2004 TIGER: Linguistic Interpretation of a German Corpus. Research on Language and Computation 2. 597–620. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charniak, Eugene, Don Blaheta, Niyu Ge, Keith Hall, John Hale & Mark Johnson
2000 BLLIP 1987–89 WSJ Corpus Release 1 LDC2000T43. DVD. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Drach, Erich
1937 Grundgedanken der deutschen Satzlehre. Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg. [Reprinted in 1963]Google Scholar
Dryer, Matthew
1995 Frequency and pragmatically unmarked word order. In Mickey Noonan & Pamela Downing (eds.), Word order in discourse, 105–135. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eerten, Laura van
2007 Over het Corpus Gesproken Nederlands. Nederlandse Taalkunde, 12. 194–215.Google Scholar
Fitz, Hartmut, Franklin Chang & Morten H. Christiansen
2011 A connectionist account of the acquisition and processing of relative clauses. In Evan Kidd (ed.), The acquisition of relative clauses. Processing, typology and function, 39–60. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Godfrey, John J., Eduard C. Holliman & Jane McDaniel
1992 SWITCH-BOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Audio, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP-92), 517–520.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
2006 Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 42. 25–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haider, Hubert
2010 Wie wurde Deutsch OV? Zur diachronen Dynamik eines Strukturparameters der germanischen Sprachen. In Arne Ziegler (ed.), Historische Textgrammatik und Historische Syntax des Deutschen – Traditionen, Innovationen, Perspektiven, 11–32. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Höhle, Tilman N.
1986 Der Begriff ‘Mittelfeld’: Anmerkungen über die Theorie der topologischen Felder. In Walter Weiss, Herbert E. Wiegand & Marga Reis (eds.), Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses, 329–340. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Hoekstra, Heleen, Michael Moortgat, Ineke Schuurman & Ton van der Wouden
2001 Syntactic annotation for the spoken Dutch corpus project (CGN). Language and Computers 37(1). 73–87.Google Scholar
Kempen, Gerard & Karin Harbusch
2016 Verb-second word order after German weil ‘because’: Psycholinguistic theory from corpus-linguistic data. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1). 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Esther & Wolfgang Lezius
2003 The TIGER language: A Description Language for Syntax Graphs, Formal Definition. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Koster, Jan
1975 Dutch as an SOV Language. Linguistic analysis 1. 111–136.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Maryellen C., Jessica L. Montag & Silvia P. Gennari
2016 Are there really syntactic complexity effects in sentence production? A reply to Scontras, et al. (2015) Cognitive Science, 40. 513–518. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Noord, Gertjan van, Gosse Bouma, Frank van Eynde, Daniël de Kok, Jelmar van der Linde, Ineke Schuurman, Erik Tjong Kim Sang, & Vincent Vandeghinste
2013 Large scale syntactic annotation of written Dutch: Lassy. In Peter Spyns & Jan Odijk (eds.), Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch, 147–164. Springer, Berlin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oostdijk, Nelleke, Martin Reynaert, Véronique Hoste & Ineke Schuurman
2013 The construction of a 500-million-word reference corpus of contemporary written Dutch. In Peter Spyns & Jan Odijk (eds.), Essential speech and language technology for Dutch, 219–247. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stegmann, Rosemary, Heike Telljohann & Erhard W. Hinrichs
2000 Stylebook for the German Treebank in Verbmobil. Saarbrücken: DFKI Report 239.Google Scholar
Wahlster, Wolfgang
(ed.) 2000 Verbmobil: Foundations of speech-to-speech translation. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Kempen, Gerard & Karin Harbusch
2019. Mutual attraction between high-frequency verbs and clause types with finite verbs in early positions: corpus evidence from spoken English, Dutch, and German. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 34:9 ► pp. 1140 ff. DOI logo
Pérez-Guerra, Javier
2022. Determinants of exaptation in Verb-Object predicates in the transition from Late Middle English to Early Modern English. In Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 105], ► pp. 132 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 february 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.