Word Order Flexibility and Adjacency Preferences: Competing Forces and Tension in the Greek VP

What is it about?

The present paper aims at further investigating the relative degree of flexibility of constituent order in Greek, which has been classified as a free word order language (Tzartzanos 1946, 1963; Greenberg 1963; Philippaki-Warburton 1982, 1985, 1987; Lascaratou 1984, 1989, 1994, among others). In this study we present additional evidence in support of the view expressed in Lascaratou (1989, 1994, 1999) that, though very flexible, Greek word order is not completely free, but rather it is the result of tension between competing forces determining linear arrangements. Focusing on the analysis of various VP structures drawn from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC)™, we observe that no single (syntactic and/or lexical/semantic) factor appears to override the others in a salient manner, the relative strength of each individual factor not always being clearly and reliably measurable. In particular, it seems that constituent length does not constitute a more important factor than the syntactic and/or lexical/semantic relations holding between elements in the Greek VP. What is more, with respect to the concept of “adjacency” put forward by Hawkins (2001, 2004) to interpret the preference for certain linearization patterns vs. others, we propose that constituent length essentially operates in a substantially different way and direction than syntactic and/or lexical/semantic dependency relations. More specifically, while—for parsing efficiency—constituent length may often be responsible for the postposition of heavy constituents thus resulting in the disruption of adjacency by separating elements which “belong together”, syntactic and/or lexical/semantic relations, on the other hand, intrinsically motivate the adjacency of elements which “belong together”, thus resisting any rearrangement that would bring them apart.

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