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....

This paper will attempt to elucidate the pragmatic conditions on these movement types. It is structured as follows: the next two sections discuss pragmatic constraints on topicalization and scrambling, respectively. A prediction is discussed in Section 4. 2 Scrambling

Phrase structure analyses of partial verb phrase (hence: PVP) fronting in German recognize PVPs as potential constituents---i.e, they are constituents not only in the Vorfeld, which they can and must be, but existing analyses inevitably have the consequence that PVPs are potential constituents in the Mittelfeld as well. Given the range of frontable PVPs this has the undesirable consequence that a great deal of otherwise unmotivated phrase structure is postulated in the Mittelfeld, which, moreover, must be assumed to provide alternative constituent structures---the structures overlap in ways incompatible with simple tree structures. Haider has noted this problem, which results in the postulation of spurious ambiguity---structural ambiguity which appears to have neither semantic correlate nor syntactic motivation. This is a problem which Pollard's "On Head Non-Movement" ends with, and the contribution here is a simple suggestion on how to avoid these unwanted ambiguities. The suggestion ...

Abstract. In this paper I discuss several possible analyses for constituent order in German. Approaches that assume continuous constituents are compared with an approach that assumes discontinuous constituents. I will show that certain proposals that have been made to analyze constituent order are either not adequate or cannot be implemented with currently available systems. For the proposals that can be implemented I will discuss the amount of work a parser has to do. I then compare two implementations of larger fragments of German: the Verbmobil grammar and the Babel grammar. It is shown that the amount of work to be done to parse the Verbmobil grammar is significantly higher than the work that has to be done parsing with the Babel grammar. Key words: German, HPSG, implementation, linearization, parsing 1.

Modifiers in general, and adverbs in particular, are neglected categories in linguistics, and consequently, their treatment in Natural Language Processing poses problems. In this article, we present the dictionary information for German adverbs which is necessary to deal with word order, degree modifier scope and other problems in NLP. We also give evidence for the claim that a classification according to position classes differs from any semantic classification.

This paper investigates the nature of the attraction of XPs to clauseinitial position in German (and other languages). It argues that there are two different types of preposing. First, an XP can move when it is attracted by an EPP-like feature of Comp. Comp can, however, also attract elements that bear the formal marker of some semantic or pragmatic (information theoretic) function. This second type of movement is driven by the attraction of a formal property of the moved element. It has often been misanalysed as “operator” movement in the past. Keywords: topicalization, focus movement, operator movement, Abar-movement 1

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Much of the debate in L2 acquisition theory concerns the extent to which the native language (L1) plays a role in the acquisition of a second or foreign language. The present paper aims to contribute to