Optimizing Structure in Context: Scrambling and Information Structure

Abstract

This dissertation examines the "free'' word order or scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory. To overcome the problems raised in single-component analyses in explaining word order variation, I propose an 'interface' approach in which the constraints from several different components of grammar participate, compete, and interact with one another. That is, various word orders are considered to be motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic,and discourse principles of these languages. As the constraints from different modules of grammar are highly conflicting, I utilize Optimality Theory to demonstrate how the constraints interact and resolve conflicts among one another. In this approach, each scrambled variant, i.e., a sentence with a particular word order, is conceived of as the "optimal'' output, which instantiates the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-contextual information given in the input. I first develop the phrase structural constraints in German and Korean, referred to as CANON, which are responsible for the mapping from the argument-structure and grammatical-function information to the phrase structure configuration, which in turn reflects the surface word order. Then, I examine the semantic and discourse effects of scrambling and propose a model of information structure based on the two cross classifying discourse features [New] and [Prom] to capture the complex interactions of topic and focus on word order. The semantic effect of specificity is also handled in terms of information structure by means of semantic restrictions on discourse feature assignment. Based on this information structure, I propose two information structuring constraints NEW and PROM, which are the mapping constraints between information structure and phrase structure, as the major driving forces of scrambling. Finally, I demonstrate the interaction and conflict-resolution among these constraints in the German and Korean scrambling data by proposing a particular ranking for each language.

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