Contextual Licensing of Marked OVS Word Order in German

Transcription

1 1 Contextual Licensing of Marked OVS Word Order in German Thomas Weskott, Robin Hörnig, Gisbert Fanselow, and Reinhold Kliegl University of Potsdam, Germany, SFB 632 Information Structure Address correspondence to: Thomas Weskott Department Linguistik Universität Potsdam Karl-Liebknecht-Str Golm

2 2 Abstract Numerous studies have shown markedness effects of German OVS word order, that is: decrease in acceptability and higher reading times. Some of these studies have shown these effects can be ameliorated by the presentation of context. These studies found that in certain contexts the acceptability and processing disadvantage of German marked word orders can be leveled out. We report on acceptability ratings and a self-paced reading study which addressed the question whether there are contexts in which German marked OVS word order is not only judged as being equally acceptable and as easy to process as its unmarked SVO counterpart, but where OVS structures are strongly licensed in the sense that they are actually judged as more acceptable and are easier to process than the unmarked SVO order. Our results show that whole-part contexts are strongly licensing in this sense, and that, an adversative relation between the marked word order sentence and the context does not play an indispensable role in the contextual licensing effect.

3 3 1. Background Word order is one of the most well-studied aspects of German grammar. Both the possibility of topicalisation, i.e. the movement of elements to the so-called Vorfeld/prefield-position, as well as Scrambling, the possibility of a re-arranging elements in the syntactic domain of the Mittelfeld/middle field, have attracted much attention from researchers interested in the interplay between syntax and information structure (see Lenerz 1976, Hoberg 1981, Höhle 1982, Uszkoreit 1986, Haider and Rosengren, 1998/2003, Müller, 1999, Fanselow 2001, and Frey, 2004, to name only a few). Common to most of these approaches is the assumption that an unmarked order exists, and that the alternative order(s) show, compared to the unmarked order, some or all of the empirical correlates of markedness. These correlates of the marked word order, compared to the unmarked one, are (a) degraded acceptability (as e.g.measured in controlled rating experiments); (b) processing difficulty (as measured in self-paced reading, EEG, or eye-tracking studies); (c) lower frequency in corpora; and (d) later age of acquisition. All of these empirical correlates seem to point into the direction of a general dispreference for the marked form compared to the unmarked one: it is less acceptable, harder to process, less frequent, etcetera. Moreover, most syntactic approaches to word order in German assume that the choice for a marked variant, or the syntactic operation deriving the marked variant from the underlying unmarked order, is optional under certain circumstances, the marked form might be chosen, but it does not have to be. Taken together, these two uncontroversial assumptions dispreference and optionality of marked word orders raise an interesting question: why would the grammar of German provide a serialisation option which apparently is dispreferred? Why should the processing mechanism of Germans be confronted with the possibility of having to process a serial input that counters its preferences? Most probably, there is no uniform answer to this question. Word order can be shown to be influenced by relative processing ease (as a function of constituent length, see Hawkins 1995)

4 4 and this factor can be shown to be at least independent of the impacts of givenness-newness (Arnold et al 2000) on the choice of marked word order. The latter aspect leads us to the general idea that the marked orders can reflect a certain information structural partition of the sentence they are part of, and that this information structural partition indicates the way how the sentence should be related to its preceding context. This has been particularly argued for in the cartographic approach introduced by Rizzi (1997), according to which the functional syntactic structure of a sentence directly reflects its partitioning into informational structural units such as Topic and Focus, but also in models which hesitate to express this basic claim in terms of functional categories (see., e.g., Neeleman & de Koot 2008). We will borrow from Krifka (2008) the idea that the information structure of an utterance is shaped by the way the sentence relates to the common ground established by the interlocutors at the time of the utterance. Thus, we may in general hypothesize that a marked form frequently serves the function of indicating a certain state of the common ground (leaving the exact nature of that state open for the time being). This is in accordance with Höhle s (1982) observation that markedness of word order correlates with contextual restrictions: while the unmarked form may appear in the maximal set of contexts, sentences (or utterances) with a marked word order tend to felicitously appear in a comparatively restricted set of contexts. But wherein does this pragmatic function consist? What, for example, are pragmatic functions of the marked object-verb-subject (OVS) order that we are concerned with here in a German sentence with a transitive verb? It is a remarkable fact that it is the left periphery of languages such as Italian or Hungarian, rather than German, for which the idea of a direct encoding of the pragmatic notions topic and focus has been developed, and it is also noteworthy that the focus-background and topic-comment articulation in the middle field (rather than the prefield) figured as the empirical basis of the theory of Neeleman & de Koot (2008) developed for Dutch. In other words, that notions such as topic or focus should matter in the analysis of the German prefield does not seem to suggest itself. Indeed, the proposals concerned with the

5 5 movement to the German prefield position rarely refer to these concepts. Weskott (2003) proposes that left peripheral direct objects are presuppositional, while Frey (2006) argues for a necessarily contrastive interpretation (Frey, 2006), a view later extended to the notion of 'salience' (Frey (2010). Fanselow & Lenertová (2010) identify cases of left peripheral objects without an information structural role (in a narrower sense). Certain instances of the construction they focus on may be due to the fact that the preposing of an object facilitates a topic shift in the following text (Hörnig et al., ms.) Speyer's (2007) corpus analysis suggests that topics (or, rather, the centers in the sense of Grosz et al., 1995) do appear in the German prefield, but when they compete with elements bearing a Poset-relation (Prince 1998, Birner & Ward, 1998) to preceding discourse, they usually lose. Poset relations are transitive, reflexive and antisymmetric, for example "part-of". Only frame-setting elements are better candidates for occupying the prefield than expressions bearing a poset-relation to an argument in the preceding sentence. In the present study, we will investigate whether the corpus effect described by Speyer (2007) is mirrored in acceptability data and processing ease. Our experiment builds on previous insights coming from the comprehension of spatial relational assertions (see Hörnig, Oberauer, & Weidenfeld, 2006; Hörnig, Weskott, Kliegl, & Fanselow, 2006), namely contexts establishing a Poset relation between the referent of the object of the critical sentence, and a referent from the preceding context. 2. Experimental studies on word order variation in German Psycholinguistic studies on German word order variation have mostly concentrated on the apparent preference of orders in which the subject precedes the object, as compared to the reverse orders where the object precedes the subject, as indicated for example in shorter reading times for sentences with unmarked word order. This processing advantage for unmarked word order has been first uncovered by Krems (1984) and labelled subject first

6 6 preference by Hemforth (1993). It has been empirically supported by numerous experimental studies with different methodologies (see Gorrell, 2000, for an overview; but also see Burckhardt, Fanselow & Schlesewsky 2007 for the absence of a subject first preference in certain contexts). These findings are in accordance with the intuitive assessment of the subject-first order as the more natural or unmarked one naïve speakers of German, if presented with, for example, an OVS structure out of context, sometimes even go so far as to claim it to be ungrammatical. At the same time, however, the notion of markedness raises the question why a structure which is dispreferred should be provided by the grammar of German in the first place. As mentioned in the previous section already, one possible answer to this question alludes to the connection between the notion of markedness and the notion of linguistic context: it is a well-established fact in many linguistic domains (e.g., phonology, morphology, lexical semantics) that marked forms have a more restricted context of appearance (hence their lower frequency), but that they do not seem marked at all when appearing in a context fulfilling the restriction the marked form imposes on the context, a phenomenon dubbed markedness reversal by Battistella (1996). For example, the dimensional adjectives long and short show a markedness asymmetry: long is the unmarked member of that pair, cf. How long is the paper? vs. How short is the paper?. In the (restricted) context of writing a short article and having to shorten it to a maximum number of pages or words, however, the marked question How short is the paper? loses its air of markedness. In these cases, the context may be said to license the marked form. The notion of contextual licensing has also been applied to the markedness asymmetry between German subject-object word order variants (see Höhle, 1982, for an early proposal). The leading idea behind psycholinguistic studies investigating marked word orders of German in context was that there must be contexts in which the marked structures would not only lose their air of markedness (and hence would be judged as equally acceptable, for example, in a rating study), but would also be as easy to process as the unmarked structure. We will call

7 7 this annihilation of the markedness difference in a licensing context weak licensing. A natural follow-up question is whether there are contexts in which the marked form is judged as more acceptable and/or is easier to process than its unmarked counterpart. Such contexts, if they exist, would exert what we will refer to as strong licensing. To the best of our knowledge, so far there is no experimental evidence for strong contextual licensing of German marked word order, with the exception of Bornkessel & Schlesewsky (2006). A number of acceptability rating studies report weak licensing effects for marked structures. These include Bader (1999) who found weak licensing of OSV structures with ambiguous and unambiguous full NPs in question contexts which asked for the subject (see Keller, 2000, Exp. 10, for a similar finding); Weskott, Stolterfoht, Bornkessel, and Schlesewsky (2004), who found weak licensing for both OSV and OVS structures with unambiguous full DPs in question contexts, and Fanselow, Lenertová & Weskott (2008) for object fronting in wide and narrow focus contexts. Weak licensing has also been found in a number of studies using on-line measures such as self-paced reading times, among them Marslen-Wilson & Bayer (1992), for unambiguous and ambiguous OVS structures in discourse contexts (see Weskott, 2003, for related findings), and in a reading-cum-judgment ERP study by Bornkessel & Schlesewsky (2006) on unambiguous OSV structures with full DPs. The latter study reports a strong licensing effect for OSV structures, that is, that they are judged as more acceptable than their SOV counterparts. However, given that in this study the target sentences were preceded by structurally parallel ones (i.e., an OSV target sentence was preceded by another OSV sentence), it is not entirely clear to us whether this effect is independent of the effect of structural parallelism of the target sentence with the sentence preceding it. With the aforementioned exception, none of these studies, however, reported strong licensing. We attribute this to two properties of these studies: to the employment of the wrong kind of contexts, which may simply have lacked the restricting force to strongly license

8 8 OSV/OVS, and to the employment of the wrong kind of structures in the critical sentences, which always used full DPs for both arguments (with the exception of Keller (2000), who used object pronouns), which runs counter the fact that in corpora, OVS structures are quite frequent with pronominalized subjects (see Weber and Müller, 2004). Moreover, the use of two referential NPs makes the experimental sentences susceptible to the possibly damaging effect of similarity-based interference (see e.g. Gordon, Hendrick, Johnson, & Lee, 2006). We set out to remedy the first problem with a context type which we hypothesized to be strongly licensing on the basis of the corpus study of Speyer (2007) and our own previous findings coming from the comprehension of spatial relational assertions (see Hörnig, Oberauer, & Weidenfeld, 2005; Hörnig, Weskott, Kliegl, & Fanselow, 2006), namely contexts establishing a Poset relation between the objects of the critical sentences (see Prince, 1998, and Birner & Ward, 1998, for a detailed account of Poset licensing of marked word order in English). Poset relations like whole-part relations are transitive, irreflexive and antisymmetric. In (1), a whole-part relation between two referents [the car in (a) and the side mirror in (b)] is given as an example of an instance of a poset relation: (1) a. Peter hat den Wagen gewaschen. Peter has the ACC car washed. Peter has washed the car b. Er hat den Außenspiegel ausgelassen. He NOM has the ACC side mirror left-out. b. Den Außenspiegel hat er ausgelassen. The ACC side mirror has he NOM left-out. The side mirror, he left out.

9 9 The second problematic aspect of previous studies was solved by employing pronominalized subjects instead of structures realising both arguments as full DPs. Possibly, this move is not innocuous, as will be discussed below. Note that, in addition to the whole-part relation between the referents of the car and the side mirror in (1.a and.b/b ), there is also an adversative relation between the propositions expressed by the sentences: for the car it holds that it was washed by Peter, while the same does not hold for the side mirror. In order to test whether the adversative relation between a referent in the preceding context and the referent of the direct object of the critical sentence had an influence on the hypothesized licensing effect, we also tested sentences/sentence pairs as the following: 1 (2) a. Peter hat den Wagen gewaschen. Peter has the ACC car washed. Peter has washed the car b. Er hat den Außenspiegel besonders gründlich gewienert He NOM has the ACC side mirror particularly diligently polished. b. Den Außenspiegel hat er besonders gründlich gewienert The ACC side mirror has he NOM particularly diligently polished. The side mirror, he polished with particular diligence. In the two experiments to be described below, we asked participants to judge (Experiment 1) and read (Experiment 2) SVO sentences like (1.b) and (2.b) and compared their judgments and reading times to those of sentences of the OVS type exemplified in (1.b ) and (2.b ). One group saw the sentences in isolation (null context group), while the other saw sentence pairs like (1.a, b) (the whole-part context group). Furthermore, we tested whether the adversative relation would have an influence on the observed effects; thus, we tested one group with the

10 10 adversative sentences/sentence pairs exemplified in (1) and compared the results to those of a group which we tested with the nonadversative ones in (2). Our general prediction was that the subject-first preference should be present in the null context group (better judgments and shorter reading times for SVO than for OVS), while, if the whole-part context is strongly licensing, the reverse pattern should be found in the whole-part context group: here, OVS should be judged as more acceptable and be read faster than SVO. Statistically this means we predicted an interaction of the factors context and word order. Concerning the adversativity of the whole-part relation, we hypothesized that the contextual licensing effect should be stronger in the adversative context-sentence pairs than in the nonadversative ones. In other words, while we predicted strong licensing of adversative contexts, we expected weak licensing of nonadversative contexts. 3. Experiment 1 In order to first assess the acceptability of German SVO and OVS structures with and without context and with and without adversativity, we conducted a paper-and-pencil acceptability rating study with four groups of participants (each N=36): one being tested on the structures in the null context on the contrastive items, one in which we tested the adversative structures in a whole-part context; one where the nonadversative items were tested in the null context condition; and finally one in which the nonadversative items were tested in the whole-part context. Method Participants We tested 144 persons, 36 per context group, 93 female and 51 male, between 20 and 26 years old (M = 22.6 years). They were all students at the University of Potsdam and were paid 4 or received course credit for their participation.

11 11 Materials We created 16 adversative context-sentence pairs which exhibited the whole-part relation described in (1) above holding between a referent in the context sentence and a referent in the target sentence (direct object). Then we created a nonadversative condition by changing the verbs of the target sentences to yield an elaborative rather than an adversative reading. For the null context group, the target sentences were stripped of their contexts. All subject noun phrases were pronominals of masculine gender (er (he)); all object noun phrases were full NPs with either case-unambiguous masculine gender (den ACC ; nine of 16 items), or with caseambiguous feminine gender (die NOM/ACC ; seven items). In addition to the SVO/OVS structures 2, the material contained 80 filler sentences testing the influence of length of intervening adverbials on the acceptability of German subject- vs. object-extracted relative clauses. For all four groups, eight experimental lists were created by randomly combining the 16 experimental items with the fillers; eight further lists were created by inverting the order of the eight original lists. Each pair of consecutive experimental items was separated by at least one filler item. In the first version, four of the experimental items were presented in the SVO condition, while the other four were presented in the OVS condition (the other eight items being realized in the two remaining conditions; s. Fn 2). For the second version, the assignment of items to word order condition was reversed. The two context groups were tested on two different occasions, as were the two contrast groups. Procedure Participants were handed a 10-page booklet containing the experimental materials, preceded by a short instruction asking them to read the sentences/sentence pairs carefully, not to rely on normative standards in their assessment of the acceptability, and to use the full range of the scale. Additionally, they were given two sample judgments, one of a perfectly grammatical sentence judged with a 7, and an ungrammatical one with a gender mismatch

12 12 ([Den MASC Auto NEUTR ] wäscht [das NEUTR Mann MASC ], the car cleans the man.). Below each experimental item, the scale from 1 to 7 was printed out, with endpoints being labelled as totally unacceptable and perfectly acceptable. Booklets were handed to participants together with the admonition to work independently of each other. The session lasted approximately 15 minutes. Design and Predictions The design was 2 (WORD ORDER; SVO VS. OVS) 2 (CONTEXT; null vs. whole-part) 2 (ADVERSE; adversative vs. nonadversative relation between context and target sentence), the latter two factors being tested between participants. Apart from a general acceptability advantage of sentences presented in context (main effect of CONTEXT), we predicted that in the null context, SVO sentences should be judged as more acceptable than their OVS counterparts, while in the whole-part contexts, the reverse should be true, i.e., an interaction of WORD ORDER and CONTEXT. Moreover, we predicted this strong licensing effect to hold for the contrastive group only, i.e. an interaction of ADVERSE with the two other factors. Data Analysis Raw judgment scores were subjected to repeated measures ANOVAs for participants and items with the factors WORD ORDER, CONTEXT, and ADVERSE. Results The mean judgments scores for the four conditions of Experiment 1 are summarized in Table 1. Table 1: Overall mean ratings (standard deviations) adversative condition null context whole-part context SVO 5.78 (1.44) 5.93 (1.59) OVS 5.61 (1.46) 6.33 (1.18) Nonadversative condition null context whole-part context SVO 6.32 (1.24) 6.28 (1.41) OVS 5.89 (1.56) 6.44 (1.12)

13 13 First, and most importantly, our results showed the predicted interaction of WORD ORDER and CONTEXT (F 1 (1,140) = 12.87, p <.001; F 2 (1,60) = 14.49, p <.001): while there was no significant effect of CONTEXT on the SVO condition (both ts < 1), there was a significant effect of CONTEXT on the OVS condition, t 1 (71) = 3.85, p <.001; t 1 (31) = 4.16, p <.001. There was, accordingly, no overall main effect of WORD ORDER (SVO: 6.08 VS. OVS: 6.07), both Fs < 1, but, as predicted by the strong licensing hypothesis, an inverse effect of word order in the whole-part context condition, t 1 (71) = 2.22, p <.05; t 1 (31) = 2.56, p <.05. The other two main effects were significant, CONTEXT having, unsurprisingly, an overall positive effect on ratings (no context: 5.09 vs. whole-part context: 6.25), F 1 (1,140) = 6.91, p=.01; F 2 (1,60)=4.61, p=.04, as well as ADVERSE (adversative: 5.91 vs. nonadversative 6.23), F 1 (1,140) = 5.97, p =.02; F 2 (1,60) = 3.89, p =.05. All other effects and interactions were not statistically reliable; in particular, ADVERSE did not enter into any interaction with the other factors, contrary to our prediction. Discussion We interpret our results as an instance of strong contextual licensing (in the sense introduced above) of German marked OVS word order. While the unmarked SVO sentences were unaffected by the contextual manipulation, the OVS sentences in the licensing wholepart context were rated significantly better than in the null context condition. Moreover, OVS sentences were rated better than their unmarked SVO counterparts in the whole-part contexts. That is, the marked word order OVS appears to be strongly licensed by a context in which the referent of the object stands in a whole-part relation to a referent in the preceding context, and in which the two referents are contrasted to each other with respect to a predicate established in the discourse (e.g., to wash the whole car vs. to leave out one of its parts, the side mirror). Note that this holds despite the fact that the target sentences in the marked condition exhibited

14 14 non-parallel syntactic structure to the preceding context sentence, different from the target sentences of Bornkessel & Schlesewsky (2006). Despite the strong licensing of the OVS order, the sentences are by all means acceptable also with SVO word order; both word orders have an average acceptability value in the vicinity of 6 which signals high acceptability on a 7 point scale. Our results therefore also reflect the overall optionality of word order variation in German. In addition, our results did not show an effect of the adversativity of the context-targetpair on the licensing effect. Apart from a general preference for the nonadversative items, which could either be a general preference for sentences with more lexical material in them, or simply a sampling error, we did not find any interaction of the ADVERSE factor with the other factors. This can be taken as a first piece of evidence that adversativity as an instance of a contrastive discourse relation between the context and the target sentence is not a necessary ingredient of strong licensing. Since the acceptability rating task can be argued to involve a fair deal of off-line metalinguistic processes, we wanted to know whether a strong licensing effect of whole-part contexts is also obtained in an on-line measure such as self-paced reading times. 4. EXPERIMENT 2 In this experiment, we tested whether the strong licensing effect found for acceptability ratings in Experiment 1 can also be established for reading time (RT). That is, we hypothesized that, while we should observe a processing difficulty for the marked OVS structures in the null context (as compared to the unmarked SVO), RTs for OVS in the wholepart context should be shorter than those for SVO. Concerning the factor ADVERSE, we expected the same main effect on reading times, as it was previously found on acceptability judgments in Experiment 1. Method Participants

15 students from Potsdam University, 36 for each group, took part in Experiment 2 (95 female, 49 male; age range: years, M = 23.2 years). They were paid 4 or received a course credit for their participation. Materials The same set of materials as in Experiment 1 was used. For the null context group, critical sentences were stripped of the context sentences. Comprehension questions were constructed which asked for factuality of the event described in the critical sentence. For example, if the critical sentence was He left out the side mirror (s. (1) above), the yesquestion would read Did he forget to wash something?, while the no-question would read Did he wash the side mirror?. For the nonadversative conditions, the comprehension questions were adjusted accordingly. All other details of the preparation of the experimental items and fillers were identical to Experiment 1. The overall experiment consisted of 96 trials. Procedure Participants were tested individually at a PC using the LINGER experimental software (version 2.94, developed by Doug Rohde. The experiment started with a training phase familiarizing the participants with the self-paced reading procedure. The experimental trials worked as follows: First, a start screen told participants to press the space bar when they were ready. Then, the sentences (for the null context group) or the sentence pairs (for the whole-part context group, one line per sentence) appeared leftaligned and masked on the screen by underscores matching the length of the masked word. By pressing the space bar, the first word appeared. A further press of the space bar revealed the second word, while the first word disappeared (non-cumulative moving window). By pressing the space bar after having read the last word of the sentence or sentence pair, respectively, the comprehension question appeared on the screen. Answers were indicated by a yes area on the lower left of the screen, and a no area on the lower right. Participants were instructed to respond by using the 1 key of the numerical keyboard for yes, and 3 for no. After the

16 16 response to the comprehension question, the start screen reappeared and the next trial would start. Overall, the experiment lasted approximately 35 minutes. Design and Predictions The design was the same as in Experiment 1, i.e. 2 (WORD ORDER) 2 (CONTEXT) 2 (ADVERSE), with the latter two again realized between participants. As in Experiment 1, we predicted a main effect of CONTEXT (RTs for the context group to be shorter than for the null context group). More importantly, we predicted an interaction of CONTEXT and WORD ORDER: in the null context, SVO RTs should be shorter than those for the marked OVS order, while OVS should show shorter RTs than SVO in the whole-part context. Data Analysis We chose the reading times of the sentence final participle (lexical verb) as the dependent variable. First, the position of this constituent was the only one being identical across all conditions. Second, the lexical verb has been shown to be the carrier of word order effects in previous studies (see Meng and Bader, 2000; Gorrell, 2000, among others). Raw RTs for the participles were screened for outliers (50ms < RT > 5000ms), and only RTs for correctly answered trials were entered into the analysis (8.3% of the data were excluded by this step). Following common usage, we log-transformed reading times and submitted log RT as well as raw RTs to separate repeated measure ANOVAs for participants and items. These analyses yielded the same results for both measures. Results and Discusssion Untransformed reading times for the sentence final participle for all conditions are summarized in Table 2. Table 2: Raw reading times of the sentence final participle in ms (standard deviations), adversative condition null context whole-part context SVO 656 (99) 652 (171) OVS 647 (132) 599 (86)

17 17 nonadversative condition null context whole-part context SVO 521 (73) 547 (72) OVS 538 (74) 582 (41) The first thing to note is that we found no evidence for the predicted main effect of CONTEXT (F 1 < 1; F 2 (1,60)=1.32, p >.10). Furthermore, the predicted interaction of word order and context turned out to be significant, though only marginally by items (F 1 (1,140)=5.48, p=.02; F 2 (1,60)=3.44, p=.07). Given the finding of the interaction in the rating experiment, we were interested in the effect of WORD ORDER separately for the two context groups, and performed a single comparisons for the two CONTEXT conditions. For the null context condition, we found no effect of word order (both ts < 1). Sentence final participles of sentences presented in isolation were read equally fast for SVO and OVS word order. In the whole-part context condition, however, we found significantly faster reading times in the OVS than in the SVO condition (t 1 (71)=2.85, p<.05; t 1 (31)=3.16, p<.01). Finally, ADVERSE had a significant main effect: participles of critical sentences in the nonadversative condition were read faster than those in the adversative condition (639 vs. 547 ms). However, ADVERSE did not enter into any interaction with the other factors. We interpret the result from the self-paced reading study in terms of a strong licensing effect of the whole-part context: while reading times between unmarked SVO and marked OVS structures did not differ in the null context, marked OVS structures were processed significantly faster than their unmarked SVO counterparts in the context where the object referent stood in a whole-part relation to a referent mentioned in the context sentence. We conclude from this that strong contextual licensing of marked OVS word order in German can be obtained if the local discourse context provides a whole-part relation in which the object, but not the subject of the sentence participates. Furthermore, it seems that, apart from the fact that the nonadversative items in our materials were generally processed faster than the

18 18 adversative ones, the adversativity of the whole-part relation does not play a role for the processing of marked word order in context. General Discussion The most important aspect of the findings described above is that marked OVS word order in German can indeed by strongly licensed by whole-part contexts of the type we have employed. Not only are OVS structures judged as more acceptable if they are embedded in such contexts, they are also processed faster, as indicated by the reading times for the lexical verb in Experiment 2. As mentioned above, this strong licensing effect does not mean, however, that the unmarked word order is not acceptable in the licensing context. Rather, the difference in acceptability is small. We attribute the failure of previous studies to find strong licensing to the fact that in these studies, participants were presented sentences with both arguments realised as full NPs, as well as to their employment of context types which apparently induced a licensing effect not strong enough to reverse the subject-first preference found in the null context. Pairs of sentences which both involve two lexical NPs are disadvantageous from the perspective of textual coherence, because they often imply either a repeated name penalty (Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993) or a very complex textual relation between the two sentences. The use of a pronominal subject in the second sentence of our experimental items avoids these difficulties. However, the decision may appear problematic in other respects. Frey (2006) assumes an operation of formal movement for German that allows to front material across an unstressed pronoun in the absence of pragmatic licensing. Likewise, Fanselow & Lenertová (2010) also show that objects can move across unstressed subjects without pragmatic motivation. These observations may be in line with the idea that the leftmost placement of the strongest accent is prosodically optimal in German (Féry 2008). OVS structures with a pronominal subject thus come with a number of syntactic and

19 19 phonological properties that need to be controlled for before more far-reaching conclusions can be drawn. To our knowledge, the type of whole-part relation we have employed in our experiment was not tested so far in connection with German OVS structures, although they have been tested in the context of locative PP fronting in German (see Hörnig et al., 2006). Given that poset-relations have been claimed to play an important role in the licensing of marked word order constructions in English (e.g. Prince, 1998 for topicalisation), it does not come as a surprise that a language with a more flexible word order than English, as German is, can be shown to be sensitive to this kind of contextual relation. As remarked above, this is also in line with the corpus study of Speyer (2007). This being said, we want to point out that the present findings have to be taken with caution for one further reason. Neither of our experiments showed clear evidence for a subject first preference in the null context condition in Experiment 1, SVO was judged better than OVS, but this effect did not reach significance; and in Experiment 2, we found no difference in processing difficulty between SVO and OVS in the null context condition. We ascribe this finding to the fact that the object NPs of the critical sentences made the accommodation of a context (in fact, a whole-part context), in which the sentence might not be marked, highly salient. Accordingly, participants in the null context group might have been successful in accommodating such a context on-line, which would explain the lack of a clear markedness effect even in the null context. These limitations notwithstanding, we take the current results to show clearly that German marked word order is subject to contextual licensing effects, and that these licensing effects can reverse the relation between marked and unmarked forms with respect to acceptability and processing difficulty. We did not attempt to integrate these findings into a larger theoretical picture of how contextual information and sentence-level preferences should be taken to interact both in theoretical and in processing terms. But we are confident that the

20 20 evidence presented here can be taken as a starting point for further investigations of the sensitivity of marked word order to local discourse structure.

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25 25 Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 632, Project C1). We want to thank Chuck Clifton, Lyn Frazier, Claudia Maienborn, and Matthias Schlesewsky for helpful discussion. We thank Petra Schienmann and her team, as well as Lena Benz, Jutta Boethke, Pavel Logacev, Anselm Metzger, Cornelia Neumann, and Nikolaus Werner for their assistance in conducting the experiments. Footnotes 1) The idea to test the contribution of adversativity to the licensing effect was brought to our attention by Claudia Maienborn. Robin Hörnig :49 Gelöscht: contrastivity 2) The experiments contained two further conditions realized within items and subjects: one with a target sentence exhibiting SVO order and the adversative conjunction aber (but; Er hat aber den Außenspiegel ausgelassen., But he omitted the rearview mirror.); and one with SVO order and a pronominal epithet instead of the subject pronoun ( Der Trottel hat den Außenspiegel ausgelassen. ). Since the two conditions are not of interest for the issue of contextual licensing, we will not report the results for them here.