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Thematic Asymmetries Do Matter! A Corpus Study of German Word Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2015

Elisabeth Verhoeven
Elisabeth Verhoeven*
Affiliation:
Humboldt-University Berlin
*
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin, Germany, [[email protected]]
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Abstract

This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 45 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2015 

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