Abstract

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....

Citations