<OT> New Posting: ROA-680

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ROA 680-0804

Phonology Competes with Syntax: Experimental Evidence for the Interaction of Word Order and Accent Placement in the Realization of Information Structure

Frank Keller <keller at inf.ed.ac.uk>
Theodora Alexopoulou <theodora at ling.ed.ac.uk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=680


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 and
Smolensky, 1993, 1997). 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.

Comments: In Cognition 79:3, 301-372, 2001.
Keywords: word order, accent, intonation, information structure, gradience, magnitude estimation
Areas: Phonology,Syntax,Psycholinguistics
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=680