Author: Lee, Hanjung

Date: June 10, 1999

Title: Markedness and Word Order Freezing




Abstract:
One of the most challenging aspects of the analysis of 'scrambling
languages' like Hindi, Korean and Russian lies in motivating various
possible constituent orders. In many of the free word order languages,
it is also not uncommon to find fixed word order phenomena. But to date
no general theory has been proposed to explain both the freedom of word
order and the loss of the word order freedom of constituents, referred
to as freezing (Mohanan and Mohanan 1994). This paper presents an
Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) account of word order in
Korean and Hindi that can account for both the free ordering and fixed
ordering of constituents. Although discourse prominence has been
recognized as a major factor affecting word order in these languages,
there is another important dimension that constrains word order
independently of discourse prominence, namely the relative markedness of
subjects and objects. The OT theory of markedness provides a fundamental
explanation for why two different types of freezing occur. In particular,
harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies and local conjunction of
constraints offer exactly the formal devices needed to capture the complex
interactions of grammatical function, thematic roles, case marking and
linear orders of nominals which underlie 'the worst of the worst' type
of freezing. It is also shown that by bidirectional optimization in OT
we predict the type of scrambling resulting in reversal of thematic role
interpretations of two arguments not to occur in sentences in which the
morphology does not distinguish subject from object or agent from other
arguments. These preliminary results suggest that freezing effects in
Korean and Hindi can be subsumed under the universal theory of markedness.
ÿ