A multifactorial approach to crosslinguistic constituent orderings

Abstract

Abstract Previous work has proposed that crosslinguistic ordering preferences are driven by several competing and cooperating factors simultaneously. Nevertheless, this proposal still lacks proper quantitative support, as most prior studies have focused on: (1) a limited set of factors and languages; (2) syntactic constructions that are not directly comparable or do not necessarily have flexible orderings. This study aims to bridge this gap, using the adpositional phrase (PP) typology as the test case. We focused on verb phrases in which the head verb has two PP dependents occurring on the same side (He talked [PP 1 with friends] [PP 2 for a long time]), the order of which allows flexibility in at least some contexts. With multilingual corpora for 20 languages and computational techniques, we investigated the roles of four theoretically motivated constraints: dependency length, semantic closeness, lexical frequency and contextual predictability, the latter three of which have rarely been addressed systematically in a crosslinguistic context. Overall, dependency length is the strongest predictor and it is more effective in postverbal than preverbal domains. In certain preverbal cases where dependency length is not effective, semantic closeness and lexical frequency play a weak role. By contrast, contextual predictability does not seem to have a consistent effect across languages.