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Saarbrücken

Despite its relatively fixed word order, English permits a considerable amount of variation in the ordering of post-verbal constituents. My goal is to explain why speakers choose one order over another. Toward this end, Jennifer Arnold and I have been investigating factors that might influence ordering. The most studied of these are grammatical complexity ('heaviness') and information structure ('newness'). Others that might be relevant include semantic relatedness among constituents and the potential for attachment ambiguities. I report on corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments designed to ascertain the influence of these factors in determining postverbal constituent ordering. These studies suggest that no one factor can account for the variation. Rather, ordering appears to be influenced by a number of interacting constraints. Further, I argue that past attempts to explain ordering variation in psycholinguistic terms have focussed too heavily on the hearer. I present evidence that the needs of the speaker in planning and
producing utterances play a central role in determining constituent
ordering.

Werner Saurer

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