Ortmann, Katrin; Voigtmann, Sophia; Dipper, Stefanie; Speyer, Augustin
An information-theoretic account of constituent order in the German middle field
Lemke, Tyll Robin; Schäfer, Lisa; Reich, Ingo; (Ed.): Information structure and information theory, Language Science Press, pp. 55–86, Berlin, 2024.
This paper proposes a novel approach to explain object order in German. Although the order of constituents is relatively free in modern German, there are clear preferences for the order dative before accusative (nominal) objects and for the order given before new objects. A range of influential factors have been described in the literature, most prominently givenness and length. We assume processing-related reasons and use information-theoretic measures, in particular surprisal and DORM (Cuskley et al. 2021), to explore the interplay of information structure and information density as factors for object order. We propose a measure called DORMdiff and the corpus of variants method for comparing information profiles between different plausible constituent orders. Our investigations show that language users follow information-theoretic principles (UID, Levy & Jaeger 2007) in choosing the object order that leads to a more uniform distribution of information. We argue that this preference also explains deviations from the unmarked object order (i.e., accusative preceding dative and new preceding given) if it is associated with smoother information profiles.