Author: Lee, Hanjung Date: Dec 06 1999 Title: The Emergence of the Unmarked Order in Hindi Remarks: Shorter version to appear in NELS30 Email: hanjung@csli.stanford.edu Abstract: This paper offers an OT-LFG account of word order freezing phenomena in Hindi (Mohanan 1992; Mohanan and Mohanan 1994). Two types of word order freezing effects found in Hindi can be characterized by the following descriptive generalizations: (i) in the type of freezing effects found in non-volitional transitives, the marked linking of experiencer to object and theme to subject is allowed only when the non-volitional experiencer is focus and the theme is topic. In this situation word order is frozen in unmarked order. (ii) In the type of freezing effects found in sentences with ambiguous case marking (e.g. double nominative construction), canonical word order determined by the thematic role hierarchy becomes fixed in a neutral context. I argue that an OT account making crucial use of harmonic alignment (Prince and Smolensky 1993; Aissen 1999) and constraint conjunction (Smolensky 1995; Aissen 1999) captures the markedness generalization about the first type of freezing effects in a way that acknowledges the universal basis of these effects and at the same time accounts for the language-particular ways in which these effects are realized: highly marked argument types occur only in unmarked position. Furthermore, by bidirectional optimization in OT (Smolensky 1996; 1998) we correctly predict that the type of scrambling resulting in the recoverability problem will not occur in sentences with ambiguous case marking. Finally, I show how contextual factors (available clues that activate faithfulness constraints and information structuring constraints) play a role in determining the interpretation of sentences with ambiguous case marking in the OT-LFG model of the parallel correspondence theory.