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

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
Published online: 12 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.210.07kem
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Kempen, Gerard & Karin Harbusch
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