Phonology competes with syntax: experimental evidence for the interaction of word order and accent placement in the realization of Information Structure

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the interaction of phonological and syntactic constraints on the realization of Information Structure in Greek, a free word order language. We use magnitude estimation as our experimental paradigm, which allows us to quantify the influence of a given linguistic constraint on the acceptability of a sentence. We present results from two experiments. In the first experiment, we focus on the interaction of word order and context. In the second experiment, we investigate the additional effect of accent placement and clitic doubling. The results show that word order, in contrast to standard assumptions in the theoretical literature, plays only a secondary role in marking the Information Structure of a sentence. Order preferences are relatively weak and can be overridden by constraints on accent placement and clitic doubling. Our experiments also demonstrate that a null context shows the same preference pattern as an all focus context, indicating that 'default' word order and accent placement (in the absence of context) can be explained in terms of Information Structure. In the theoretical part of this paper, we formalize the interaction of syntactic and phonological constraints on Information Structure. We argue that this interaction is best captured using a notion of grammatical competition, such as the one developed by Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993. In particular, we exploit the optimality theoretic concept of constraint ranking to account for the fact that some constraint violations are more serious than others. We extend standard Optimality Theory to obtain a grammar model that predicts not only the optimal (i.e., grammatical) realization of a given input, but also makes predictions about the relative grammaticality of suboptimal structures. This allows us to derive a constraint hierarchy that accounts for the interaction of phonological and syntactic constraints on Information Structure and models the acceptability patterns found in the experimental data.PHONOLOGY COMPETES WITH SYNTAX 2

Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German: an experimental investigation

“…Taken together, these results suggest that there is no relevant difference between webbased and lab-based data for grammaticality judgment data of the type reported by Keller & Alexopoulou (2001).…”

“…We assume that this result carries over to the data in the present experiment, which also relied on grammaticality judgments collected over the web, and employed an experimental methodology that is virtually identical to the one used by Keller & Alexopoulou (2001). Verb classes and class members used in Experiment 2.…”

“…In this Appendix, we will discuss how the experimental software used in Experiment 1 and 2 is designed to address these problems, and summarize the results of a validation study reported by Keller & Alexopoulou (2001).…”

“…Such a comparison is provided by Keller & Alexopoulou (2001), who present experiments that investigate native speakers' judgments of word order preferences in Greek. They include a validation study that supports the claim that web-based experimental data and laboratory data yield comparable results: separate ANOVAs on the web-based and the lab-based judgments reveal the same significant main effects and interactions.…”

Word order and intonation in Georgian

“…Empirical studies on intonational languages show that the role of prosody outranks the role of syntax on the felicity conditions of a particular linguistic expression. Keller and Alexopoulou (2001) present evidence from Modern Greek that violations of prosodic constraints have a stronger negative effect on contextual felicity than violations of word order constraints and they conclude that prosodic structures are 'grammaticalized' expressions of information structure, while word orders are not.…”