Arguments and adjuncts in German, French, and Spanish

What is it about?

Sentences may contain constituents that encode participants of the event expressed by the verb (arguments), but there may also be additional constituents describing information about the circumstances under which the event takes place (adjuncts). French-German contrastive linguistics claims that, on average, French sentences contain more arguments (and less adjuncts) than German sentences do, and if you look at original texts and their translations, this seems to be true. I compared independent original texts that are similar with respect to their content and stylistic properties. No significant difference could be found between German and French, and even the null-subject language Spanish did not show a different behavior. This means that at least in this kind of texts, the three languages have the same proportion of arguments vs. adjuncts, regardless of their otherwise existing typological differences.

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Why is it important?

The claim about the different argument/adjunct proportions in French and German is one of the long-known, often-cited and easily-illustrated theses in romance-Germanic contrastive linguistics. It is therefore astonishing that it has rarely been empirically tested. This investigation tries to fill this gap, relying on transparent methods and statistical analyses.

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