| ROA: | 323 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Emergence of the Unmarked Order |
| Authors: | Hanjung Lee |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 24 |
| Abstract: | The Emergence of the Unmarked Order Hanjung Lee Stanford University One of the most challenging aspects of the analysis of \'scrambling languages\' like Hindi, Korean and Russian lies in motivating various possible constituent orders. In many of the free word order languages, it is also not uncommon to find fixed word order phenomena. But to date no general theory has been proposed to explain both the freedom of word order and the loss of the word order freedom of constituents, referred to as freezing (Mohanan and Mohanan 1994). This paper presents an Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) account of word order in Korean and Hindi that can account for both the free ordering and fixed ordering of constituents. Although discourse prominence has been recognized as a major factor affecting word order in these languages, there is another important dimension that constrains word order independently of discourse prominence, namely the relative markedness of subjects and objects. In this paper I show that the OT theory of markedness provides a fundamental explanation for why two different types of freezing occur. In particular, harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies and local conjunction of constraints offer exactly the formal devices needed to capture the complex interactions of grammatical function, thematic roles, case marking and linear orders of nominals which underlie \'the worst of the worst\' type of freezing. It is also shown that by bidirectional optimization in OT we predict the type of scrambling resulting in reversal of thematic role interpretations of two arguments not to occur in sentences in which the morphology does not distinguish subject from object or agent from other arguments. These preliminary results suggest that freezing effects in Korean and Hindi can be subsumed under the universal theory of markedness. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |