No abstract

Research on grammatical variation and change has traditionally been based on diachronic and synchronic corpus analysis, but the growing importance of experimental approaches to the study of language has led many researchers to combine corpus study with experimentation to systematically examine linguistic variability and stability [...]

This study provides a synthesis of corpus-based and experimental investigations of word-order preferences in German infinitival complementation. We carried out a systematic analysis of present-day German corpora to establish frequency distributions of different word-order options: extraposition, intraposition, and ‘third construction’. We then examined, firstly, whether and to what extent corpus frequencies and processing economy constraints can predict the acceptability of these three word-order variants, and whether subject raising and subject control verbs form clearly distinguishable subclasses of infinitive-embedding verbs in terms of their word-order behaviour. Secondly, our study looks into the issue of coherence by comparing acceptability ratings for monoclausal coherent and biclausal incoherent construals of intraposed infinitives, and by examining whether a biclausal incoherent analysis gives rise to local and/or global processing difficulty. Taken together, our results revealed that (i) whilst the extraposition pattern consistently wins out over all other word-order variants for control verbs, neither frequency nor processing-based approaches to word-order variation can account for the acceptability of low-frequency variants, (ii) there is considerable verb-specific variation regarding word-order preferences both between and within the two sets of raising and control verbs under investigation, and (iii) although monoclausal coherent intraposition is rated above biclausal incoherent intraposition, the latter is not any more difficult to process than the former. Our findings indicate that frequency of occurrence and processing-related constraints interact with idiosyncratic lexical properties of individual verbs in determining German speakers’ structural preferences.

Gli ordini e i collegi professionali sono tradizionalmente annoverati tra le formazioni sociali che operano nell'ordinamento giuridico, trovando anche esplicito riconoscimento normativo, sebbene non a livello costituzionale. Il presente lavoro ha lo scopo di indagare gli aspetti peculiari degli ordini, a cominciare dalla loro natura giuridica, che si pone in equilibrio tra autonomia e regolazione. Nell'esaminare le modalità di esercizio delle funzioni loro riconosciute, le autrici evidenzieranno di volta in volta i punti di contatto tra la dimensione collettiva, di cui gli ordini sono espressione e custodi, e quella individuale, che attiene ai singoli professionisti. Emergerà come, in ragione anche di previsioni normative generiche, non sempre vi sia compiuta corrispondenza col principio solidarista che dovrebbe regolare tali interazioni