Chapter 5. ‘Optional’ direct objects: Free variation?

Abstract

While the existence of free variation is widely acknowledged in phonology, it has often been denied for lexicon and syntax. Syntactic variation, according to the consensus among many, is never truly free; apparent counterexamples are just cases of undetected complementary distribution. Among these phenomena suggesting free variation are optional objects in German, which can be and have been described as valency alternatives of individual verbs. In this paper, linguistic units – phonemes as well as lexemes and syntactic configurations – are uniformly modelled as interpretation and production rules of different strengths, allowing for redundancies due to the licensing of the same structure on different linguistic levels. Introductory examples from phonology are extended to morphology and eventually to the aforementioned ‘optional’ direct objects. Based on a large acceptability rating study, it will be shown that most of the phenomena in question are neither cases of free variation nor of complementary distribution; instead, they are the result of partially equivalent distribution systematically arising from the conflict of rules of different degrees of specificity on different linguistic levels.