Syntactic Weight Versus Information Structure in Word Order Variation

Abstract

The focus of the present paper is word order variation within languages. There is a widespread view in the literature that the selection among truth-conditionally equivalent word order variants permitted by the grammar is determined primarily by considerations of “information structure”, i.e. pragmatic-semantic notions such as predictability or importance (Givon 1983, 1988), agency, definiteness (Jacobs 1988), etc. It is generally agreed that syntactic weight or length is also relevant in performance, but the extent of this relevance is usually seen as being limited to a handful of structures that are particularly difficult for processing, such as center embeddings and the positioning of finite clause complements (cf. e.g. Grosu & Thompson 1977, Dryer 1980).

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