The position of object pronouns in the German middlefield

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus study of the position of object pronouns relative to a non-pronominal subject in embedded clauses of German. A total of 4322 embedded clauses from the deWaC corpus (Baroni, Marco, Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi & Eros Zanchetta. 2009. The WaCky Wide Web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora.Language Resources and Evaluation Journal23(3). 209–226), a corpus of written German Internet texts, were analyzed. In 67.0% of all clauses, the object pronoun occurred in front of the subject. Several factors that have been proposed in the literature on word order alternations were found to govern the choice between subject–object and object–subject order in the corpus under investigation. The most important findings are: (i) The Extended Animacy Hierarchy and the Semantic Role Hierarchy independently contribute to the choice of word order. (ii) The Definiteness Hierarchy has a strong effect on the position of the object pronoun. (iii) Word order effects of constituent weight, measured as length in number of words, cannot be reduced to effects of grammatical factors, nor can effects of grammatical factors be reduced to effects of weight.