Does Constituent Length predict German Word Order in the Middle Field? Gisbert Fanselow University of Potsdam INTRODUCTION Suchsland (1993) is one of the few studies discussing the consequences of German constituent order in VP for X-bar-theory. He shows that non-arguments may be hierarchically closer to a head than arguments, in contrast to what was claimed by Chomsky (1981:38). A question left open by Suchsland concerns the identification of the factors that determine under which conditions adjuncts intervene between the verb and the object. Suchsland discusses phonology and pragmatics (p.139) as likely causes. In the present study, I will not focus on these factors, but on one further parameter: constituent length. According to Behaghel's Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder (Law of increasing constituents), shorter constituents tend to precede longer ones (in German). Hawkins (1994) claims to have shown that constituent length is a crucial factor for order. He draws this conclusion from analyses of a set of corpora from many languages, and develops a formal theory of serialization. In this theory, linear arrangements of constituents which are cognitively simpler are predicted to be more frequent that arrangements that are cognitively difficult. The cognitive difficulty of a constituent X is a function of the ratio between the number of its immediate constituents (ICs) Y 1,...Y n, and the number of words necessary to recognize all of Y 1,...Y n, (the words in the "constituent recognition domain", CRD). Recognition is assumed to be possible as soon as the word identifying the categorial status of a constituent (its head, or an unambiguous specifier) has been parsed. For phrases in which constituents are (typically) recognized at the left edge, this implies that shorter XPs should precede longer ones. The VPs in (1) have three constituents. The CRD of (1a) consists of 15 words, while the CRD of (1b)'s VP consists of four words only. Thus, (1b) is less difficult in terms of CRD, so the construction type (1b) should be more frequent than (1a). This prediction is borne out, as Hawkins (1994) argues on the basis of a text frequency analysis. (1) a. he [ VP [ V gave] [ NP the precious book about the new theory of constituent order developed by Jim [ PP to Mary]]
b. he [ VP [ V gave] [ PP to Mary][ NP the precious book about the new theory of constituent order developed by Jim]] German VPs are (underlyingly, at least) head-final, but they contain mostly head-initial phrases. The VP in (2) consists of four ICs (by Hawkins' criteria), and only the last word, the verb, allows the recognition of the last IC. Therefore, the CRD of such a VP is always the whole VP- the internal order of arguments should not matter. In general, the IC/CRD ratio makes no predictions about order in head-final phrases Σ when Σ's ICs are recognized at their left periphery. (2) er wird [ VP [ PP am Freitag] [ NP den Brief] [ PP in den Postkasten] [ V stecken]] he will on Friday the letter into the mailbox put Hawkins (1994:81-83) claims, however, that serialization is governed by length in such cases as well. He introduces the notion of calculating the ratio between (recognized) immediate constituents and the number of words necessary for their recognition from left to right. Those orders are preferred that maximize the number of constituents recognized at an early point. (3a) should therefore be preferred over (3b), since two ICs of VP can be recognized in (3a) after three words, whereas the second constituent of VP can be recognized after the sixth word only in (3b). (3) a. er wird [ VP [ die Studentin] [mit einem Buch über Logik] erfreuen] he will the student with a book about logic please b. er wird [ VP [mit einem Buch über Logik] [die Studentin] erfreuen] The purpose of the present study is to check whether this extension of the original approach is supported by the data. DESCRIPTION OF THE PRESENT STUDY Hawkins (1994:188-190) claims that NP PP (=NP before PP) is the normal order of German, and that reordering to PP NP takes place in order to make longer constituents follow shorter ones. If this is correct, German would be a language that serializes constituents on the basis of the left-to-right extension of the IC/CRD-rule. The primary motivation for reanalysing Hawkins' data lies in the fact that the dimension "NP-PP" does not reflect a uniform category from a grammatical point of view. In particular, the category PP contains at least two (up to four, according to Suchsland 1993) subcategories: arguments and adjuncts. We therefore established order facts for such subcategories of PP. Like Hawkins, we chose the 100 pages of Peter Handke's Die linkshändige Frau as the source for the data base. This
choice was made in order to maximize the comparability of our results with Hawkins' study. The results of a more representative text corpus will be presented as well, however. As in Hawkins's (1994) analysis, we did not consider NP-PP-pairs in which the placement of either category is determined by a non-violable grammatical law of German, i.e. we excluded XPs moved to the prefield and XPs moved to the specifier of CP in indirect questions and relative clauses. Furthermore, subjects were not included, as in Hawkins's corpus. In the 100 pages of Die linkshändige Frau, there are 313 NP-PP pairs in 294 clauses. Hawkins (1994) just considered 89 NP-PP pairs, and this difference is due to the fact that our selection criteria differed from Hawkins' in three respects: 1. We included pronominal NPs. Their order is partially governed by a rule placing them into the so-called Wackernagel position. Of the 313 pairs, 141 involve a pronominal NP, and in 139 cases, the pronoun precedes the PP. This confirms the strong tendency to put pronouns into the Wackernagel position -Wackernagel's law overrides other principles of serialization. We therefore ignored pronouns in the further analysis, being left with 172 NP-PP pairs. 2. An unimportant difference between Hawkins' and our corpus comes from the fact that we did not exclude indirect objects and predicative NPs. Since their number is small, this does not influence the findings reported below. 3. Hawkins confined his corpus to clauses with the format (4), with the possible addition of a subject, i.e. he did not consider clauses with additional PPs, adverbs, etc. This makes sense for head-initial structures: by confining oneself to structures such as V PP1 PP2, one does not mix up effects of the pure IC/CRD predictions (not affecting the order of PP1 and PP2 in VP = V PP1 PP2 CP) with effects of the extended left-to-right-calculation. Since German VPs are head-final, nothing is gained by the exclusion of more elaborate structures. An obvious reason for enlarging the data base is that fine-grained analyses are impossible on the basis of 89 items only. Therefore, our corpus contains all [-pronominal] NP-PP pairs in the text. (4) [(prefield) (complementizer/verb) NP + PP (verbal particle) (verb)] BASIC FACTS ABOUT THE CORPUS Table 1 summarizes basic findings for the two corpora. The percentage of pairs compatible with Hawkins' approach is lower in the larger data base: in Hawkins' corpus 84.3% of the pairs are compatible with the claim that order is optimal when shorter XPs precede longer ones ("length rule, LR"). In our corpus, just 75.6 % of the pairs are compatible with LR. Hawkins interprets all pairs in which NP and PP have equal length as not disconfirming his
approach, but such pairs certainly do not confirm it either. A more conservative interpretation has to exclude pairs of NPs and PPs of equal length from consideration. In the smaller corpus, 14 of the 68 pairs left (=20.6%) begin with a longer XP, in the larger corpus, 32.1% (42 out of 131) of the remaining pairs disconfirm the length rule. Table 1: Basic facts about the two corpora Hawkins's data Our data total number of NP-PP pairs 89 172 % compatible with length rule 84.3% 75.6% % confirming length rule 79.4% 67.9% NP-initial structures 77.5% 74.4% % NP-initial structures compatible with length rule 89.9% 84.6% % PP-initial structures disconfirming length rule 35% 50% % NP.initial structures with NP = PP 85.7% 80.5% An important aspect becomes evident when we consider length in PP-initial pairs. In the larger corpus, only 22 of 44 pairs do not violate the length rule (= 50%). Hawkins' assumption that NP PP is the "normal" order is hardly compatible with this. Under a standard interpretation, "normal" order is base-generated, amd other orders are derived by scrambling. In half of the cases (larger corpus), the reordering transformation scrambling would have had to apply against the predictions of LR. DIRECTIONAL PPS AND SIMILAR CATEGORIES Directional PPs form the largest subgroup of PPs in our corpus: 61 of 172 NP-PP pairs (35.5%) belong to it. Consider table 2: Table 2: Directional PPs XP1 > XP2 XP1 = XP2 XP1 < XP2 XP1 > XP2 by more XP1 < XP2 by more than 3 words than 3 words number 5 15 41 2 3 Pairs involving a directional PP are underrepresented among NP-PP-pairs disconfirming LR (11.9% of disconfirming cases), but overrepresented in the set of pairs compatible with LR (43,8% of compatible pairs). The most important observation is, however, that there is no single instance of a directional PP preceding the NP. Thus, length does not govern the serialization of directional PPs at all, rather, it is a relatively strict rule of grammar that direct object NPs precede directional PPs. One potential cause was mentioned above: directional
PPs have a different grammatical status, they belong to an inner VP-layer of the sort proposed by Suchsland (1993), whereas direct object NPs belong to a higher one. Mixing these layers is dispreferred. The linearization of directional PPs fails to take into account length differences. Directional PPs may also be interpreted as predicates of a small clause, of which the verb's object is the semantic subject. There were 4 additional NP-PP pairs which allow a small clause analysis on other grounds. They are NP-initial and in two of them, NP was longer than PP. Thus, length does not govern serialization in 65 of 172 cases: the rule is that the semantic subject precedes its predicate. In seventeen further pairs, the PP indicates a SOURCE, which allows a small clause analysis, too. The results for this category are represented in table 3 Table 3: Source PPs Order 1st XP longer than 2 nd equal length 2nd XP longer than 1st PP NP: 3 1-2 NP PP: 14 4 3 7 The relative order of NP and PP shows a strong bias for NP-initiality (82.3%), and length does not figure prominently, suggesting that NP PP is normal. Another subgroup is constituted by prepositional objects and constructions with light verbs. The eight cases in point support a strong grammatical bias in favor of NP PP, and indicate once more that length does not influence serialization in this domain. Table 4: prepositional objects/light verbs. Order 1st XP longer than 2nd equal length 2 nd XP longer than 1st PP NP - 1 - NP PP 7 3 2 2 We add to the class of examples with serialization determined by grammar the four instances of wie/als (as)-pps with NP PP order (and sometimes extraposition of PP): such PPs are predicative in nature, and therefore difficult to reorder according to German grammar. To sum up, we have seen that the serialization of at least 94 of 172 pairs (= 54.6 %) is governed by grammar alone. of these 94 pairs, only 4 begin with PP, i.e. 70.3% of the NP-initial pairs are grammatically serialized. In other words, of the remaining 78 pairs, 40 are PP-initial. 16 of the 94 pairs contradict the length rule (=17%). Although the cases discussed so far make up more than half of the corpus, they just account for 38.1% of the counterexamples. LOCATIVE PPS
There are 35 NP-PP pairs in the corpus involving a locative PP. In 19, the NP precedes the PP. The length facts are revealing: Table 5: Locative PPs Order 1st XP longer than 2nd equal length 2nd XP longer than 1 st PP > NP (16 cases) 10 3 3 NP > PP (19 cases) 2 8 9 NP>PP, true direct objects 1 7 8 Of the 19 NP PP pairs, 3 can be analysed as small clauses, in which case they should not be taken into consideration (=row 4). Table 5 shows that the two major claims of Hawkins cannot be maintained simultaneously, viz. that NP PP is unmarked, and that reordering has the effect of making shorter XPs precede longer ones: there are 10 counterexamples (and only 3 confirming cases) for the conjunction of the two hypotheses. With the conservative interpretation of row 4, Hawkins' approach works better if PP NP is normal for locative PPs: with one exception, reordering to NP PP does not increase the processing load of VP. Optimizing length relations would be necessary for reordering, but not sufficient, since only 8 out of 18 cases in which PP is longer shift to NP PP. Thus, two questions arise: Is PP NP normal for locative PPs? Are there other factors that account for serialization? Definiteness is relevant for order in German. No clear picture emerges from table 6. 10 of 16 indefinite objects precede PP. This suggests that NP PP is normal, because indefinites are not likely to be preposed. Table 7 also supports the view that NP PP is normal, since it allows us to uphold the claim that indefinite XPs are placed in front of definite XPs by scrambling/reordering under special circumstances only. Of the five PP-initial cases in the NP-indefinite class, three violate the length rule, another point against ordering by length. Table 6: Definiteness of the direct object definite indefinite NP PP, NP shorter/equal 6 9 NP PP, NP longer 0 1 PP NP, PP short 4 2 PP NP, PP long 6 4 Table 7: Definiteness of both XPs NP definite NP indefinite PP with definite NP 16 of which 10 PP NP 14 of which 9 NP PP
PP with indefinite NP - 2 Definiteness facts thus point to a NP PP normal order. Let us consider the issue from a grammatical point of view as well. If rhematic material does not undergo scrambling/ reordering, the situation in (5) - (6) finds an explanation: (5) wem hat er die Blumen gegeben? "to whom has he given the flowers?" a. er hat Maria die Blumen gegeben he has Mary the flowers given b. er hat die Blumen Maria gegeben (6) was hat er Maria gegeben? "what has he given Mary?" a. er hat Maria Blumen gegeben he has Mary flowers given b.??er hat Blumen Maria geschenkt That both (5a) and (5b) are appropriate answers to (5) suggests that IO DO is the normal order - we can then assume that Maria occupies its base position in both examples, and that (5b) arises by scrambling the direct object in front of the indirect object. That (6b) is not an appropriate answer to (6) supports this view: the direct object follows the indirect object in normal order, and can end up in front of the latter by scrambling only, which is hardly likely to apply to a rhematic direct object as in (6b), cf. also Lenerz (1977). A consideration of such question-answer pairs suggests that NP PP is normal for locative PPs: (7a) and (7b) are answers to (7), while (8b) sounds odd. (7b) shows that Maria is in its unscrambled base position when preceding the locative PP, while (8b) shows the locative PP is not in its unscrambled normal position when it precedes NP. (7) Wen hat er im Park gesehen? "who has he seen in-the park?" a. er hat im Park Maria gesehen he has in-the park Mary seen b. er hat Maria im Park gesehen (8) Wo hat er Maria gesehen? "where has he seen Mary?" a. er hat Maria im Park gesehen b.??er hat im Park Maria gesehen However, such considerations hold for locative PPs only which modify the direct object. With a subject-oriented interpretation of the locative PP, PP NP order seems possible as well, as the accepatibility of the b-answer to (9) suggests. (9) wo kann ich meine Frau anrufen? "where can I call my wife?"
a. Sie können ihre Frau im Hinterzimmer anrufen you can your wife in the back-room call b. Sie können im Hinterzimmer ihre Frau anrufen We conclude that a standard test for normal order suggest that NP locative PP is normal order, with the possible exception of a PP NP normal order option in the case of subjectoriented locative PPs. This is in line with results of Maienborn (1996). Table 8 analyses the 32 NP-[locative] PP-pairs along the dimension of subject- vs. object orientation. Since PPs could not always be assigned to the these categories unambiguously, two numbers are given in row 3, the referring to an event-biased, the second to an NP-biased interpretation. Table 8: Subject vs. object orientation and order object orientied event orientied subject oriented NP PP 14 2 0 PP NP 2/3 9/5 5/8 Under an NP-biased interpretation, subject oriented PPs (8 cases) precede the direct object, while object oriented (14 of 17) follow it. A minimal distance principle identifiable in other domains as well (cf., e.g., Aoun & Li 1993) is at work: a PP is semantically orientied to the closest c-commanding NP, so that the order PP direct object is highly marked if the PP is semantically related to the direct object - the closest c-commanding NP for such a PP is the subject. Since all directional and source PPs are object oriented, too, the minimal distance principle makes a prediction for NP PP order in at least 102 cases, of which 96 are fulfilled (94.1%), and it makes an additional PP NP prediction for the subject oriented cases, all of which are fullfilled, raising the success rate to 94.5% of 110 pairs. The serialization of locative PPs with respect to direct object is governed, in clear cases, by the question of whether the PP is predicated over the object or not. Whether this is a principle of formal grammar, a consequence of semantic rules, or a consequence of avoiding intolerable mis-analyses in the case of subject-oriented PPs need not concern us: what is important is that the serialization of locative PPs is not governed by LR. THE REMAINING CATEGORIES Among the remaining 43 pairs, only two larger subgroups can be identified, temporal and instrumental PPs. Consider table 9 for temporal PPs. The category is small: after the elimination of the cases noted below table 9, only seven instances remain, of which 6 are PPinitial, suggesting PP NP is normal. Length is again no good predictor for order.
Table 9: Temporal PPs Order 1st XP longer than 2nd equal length 2nd XP longer than 1 st PP > NP 7* 3 1 2 (3)* NP > PP 3# -(1 ) - 1(2#) *=one NP is the nominative argument of a be-construction; #=one NP is an indirect object = one NP is the subject of an embedded ECM-construction, temporal PP belongs to matrix. If PP NP is normal for temporal PPs, 6 of 7 pairs appear in this normal order, half of which violate LR. The only instance of reordering is in line with LR, but the length difference is small: 1 word. Table 10 contains the facts for instrumental PPs: Table 10: Instruments Order 1st XP longer than 2 nd equal length 2nd XP longer than 1st PP > NP 10 5 1 4 NP > PP 6 1 1 4 There are just two instances with a large length difference, one (by three words) confirming, one (by four words) disconforming LR. NP PP normal order for instrumental PPs is not compatible with LR: in half of the cases, reordering would have increased processing load. If PP NP is normal for instrumental PPs, there would be just one counterexample, but again, we observe reordering in only 4 of 9 cases in which the PP is longer, which shows that length is at best a necessary, but never a sufficient condition for reordering. That (11b) sounds odd suggests, however, that NP PP is the normal order. The linearization of instrumental PPs thus constitutes a further problem for LR. (10) Was hat er mit dem Schraubenzieher repariert? "what has he fixed with the screwdriver" a. er hat mit dem Schraubenzieher sein RADIO repariert he has with the screwdriver his radio fixed b. er hat sein RADIO mit dem Schraubenzieher repariert (11) Womit hat er sein Radio repariert? "With what has he fixed his radio?" a. er hat sein Radio mit dem Schraubenzieher repariert b.??er hat mit dem Schraubenzieher sein Radio repariert Among the remaining examples, 7 pairs are in line with LR, 5 are incompatible with it and 5 neutral. In the complete set of 40 NP-PP pairs involving direct objects and not accounted for by the grammatical principles discussed above, 14 pairs violate LR, 18 support it positively, and 8 are just compatible with it because the length of the two XPs does not differ. Table 11
contrasts the number of confirming and disconfirming cases for larger length differences if directional PPs and related cases are ignored. No picture favoring LR emerges. Table 11: Pairs with a length difference greater than 2 length difference all pairs PP-initial NP-initial 3 + confirming: 12 disconfirming: 9 confirming: 6 disconfirming: 5 confirming: 6 disconfirming: 4 4 + confirming: 6 disconfirming: 8 confirming: 3 disconfirming: 5 confirming: 3 disconfirming: 3 5 + confirming: 5 disconfirming: 4 confirming: 3 disconfirming: 2 confirming: 2 disconfirming: 2 6 + confirming: 4 disconfirming: 3 confirming: 3 disconfirming: 1 confirming: 1 disconfirming: 2 7 + confirming: 2 disconfirming: 2 confirming: 2 disconfirming: 1 confirming: 0 disconfirming: 1 CONCLUSIONS: THE HANDKE CORPUS In the majority of cases, two principles govern serialization: PPs follow the NP they are semantically oriented to, and non-referential XPs are not reordered. These rules are relevant for 70% of the pairs, with a success rate greater than 94%. Among the remaining 40 NP-PP pairs, there are nearly as many pairs contradicting the length rule (14) as there are pairs that confirm it (18). Our analysis shows that one of the constructions Hawkins (1994) cites as supporting the idea that left-to-right calculations of the IC/CRD ratio influence word order refutes rather than corroborates his assumptions. This is not just relevant for the laws governing order in German. It illustrates the general point that simple frequency counts involving coarse categories such as PP may be fairly misleading since the true generalizations emerge only when the relevant grammatical distinctions are taken into account. A MORE REPRESENTATIVE CORPUS One might object that our corpus is not representative. This criticism is correct but affects all frequency calculations in Hawkins (1994), with the possible exception of his Finnish data. We analyzed a larger, more representative text corpus as well - the overall results were identical. This text corpus was composed of a mixture of spoken language extracted from the IdS corpora, and of written language composed of parts of fictional and non-fictional texts. Table
12a corroborates the view that NP PP is normal for directional PPs (165:11), and the few cases of reordering are definitely not in line with LR. Source PPs (Table 12b) also fail to support LR. If NP PP would be normal for locative PPs, LR would be strongly disconfirmed by the 59 PP initial cases in which PP is longer than NP, because the PP would have to be the reordered category. Table 12a: Directional PPs NP shorter NP than/ longer equal PP than PP NP 134 31 PP 10 1 Table 12d: Temporal NP shorter NP than/ longer equal PP than PP NP 29 7 PP 65 37 Table 12b: Source NP shorter NP than/ longer equal PP than PP NP 19 2 PP 10 4 Table 12c: Locative NP shorter NP than/ longer equal PP than PP NP 93 33 PP 59 37 Table 12e: Manner NP shorter NP than/ longer equal PP than PP NP 49 12 PP 41 10 Table 12f: Instrument NP shorter NP than/ longer equal PP than PP NP 23 9 PP 27 10 Tables 12d-f show that LR would be violated in the majority of cases if NP PP is the normal order for the subcategories temporal, manner and instrumental PPs. The data from the more representative corpus are in line with what we found in the text Hawkins (1994) used. FACTS FROM OTHER LANGUAGES Length considerations do not play a role in determining order in the German VP. We showed this by an in-depth investigation of the text corpus used by Hawkins (1994), and our conclusion is in line with a more representative text corpus. This absence of a length effect is to be expected if the on-line left-to-right calculation of the IC/CRD ratio is irrelevant for serialization, in contrast to what Hawkins (1994) has claimed.
German might be special, however. The obligatory verb-second rule for main clauses implies that there are two kinds of VPs, those like (12a,b) in which the CRD of the VP necessarily comprises the whole VP, and those like (12c) for which this does not hold because the verb comes early. For (12a,b), we get serialization by length predictions only by applying the leftto-right extension of calculating the IC/CRD ratio, for (12c) predictions follow from an overall calculation as well. (12) a. dass Hans das Buch auf das Regal stellte that Hans the book onto the shelf placed b. Hans hat das Buch auf das Regal gestellt Hans has the book on the shelf placed c. Hans stellte das Buch auf das Regal Hans placed the book on the shelf The relevance of a left-to-right-calculation must thus be assessed for more languages as well. Recall that Hawkins (1994) gives a somewhat biased interpretation of his data, by interpreting pairs of XPs with equal length as confirming evidence (rather than rating them as neutral). A re-assessment of the degree of confirmation which one gets when one disregards such neutral cases was not possible for all the data in Hawkins (1994), but if ones look at the facts summarized in table 13, an interesting picture emerges. If pairs for which length rule makes no prediction (pairs of phrases of equal length) are disregarded (last column) the success rate stays well above 85% in English, Rumanian and Hungarian, and is at 84.3% for Finnish if we somewhat incorrectly add up the two prefinal rows of the table - incorrectly becausexp-np pairs were rated for half of the corpus only by Hawkins. Assuming that this half is representative for the whole corpus. we can project the following numbers: NP = XP 48 + 2x23 = 94 cases estimated. shorter constituent preceding: 153 + 210 = 363 cases estimated longer constituent preceding: 38 + 20 = 58 cases. This would result in a success rate of around 86%. Table 13: Conservative interpretation of the data in Hawkins (1994), where possible Language Type neutral positive negative % positive & % neutral positive English p.129 PP-PP 35 108 18 88.8 85.7 Hungarian p.133 NP-NP 21 85 10 91.4 89.5
Rumanian p. 134 XP XP 18 175 23 89.4 88.4 Turkish p.137 NP NP 102 59 40 81.3 59.6 Japanese p.142 NP NP 51 46 24 80.2 65.7 Japanese p. 143 subj-obj 37 33 15 40-95% 68.7 Japanese p. 150 PP PP 31 25 10 84.4 71.4 Japanese p. 152/3 NP PP 91 110 43 82.4/91% 71.9 Korean p. 156 subj- obj 59 67 56 37-95% 54.5 Korean p. 158 NP- PP 15 58 14 82 80.5 Korean p. 159 PP NP 9 50 10 85.5 83.3 Korean p. 159 NP PP 6 8 6 70 57.1 Finnish p. 170 NP XP 48 153 38 84.1 80.1 Finnish p. 170 XP NP 23 105 10 92.8 91.3 Finnish p. 171 give + objects 18 136 13 93.4 91.3 Note: For Hungarian, head initial NPs only were counted. The success rate for Japanese depends on the assumptions one makes concerning Japanese clause structure. In the more careful interpretation, the success rate goes down to a value between 60 and 72% only for German, Japanese, Turkish and Korean - with one exception, viz. Korean NP-PP order, which may be due to a grammaticalization of PP before NP, as the data suggest. What the two groups of languages have in common, respectively, is easy to guess: if neutral cases do not count, there are high success rates for verbinitial languages, and low success rates for verbfinal languages. If table 13 is representative, we may conclude that length is a governing factor for serialization in head-initial categories only - presumably because only there, the absolute IC/CRD-ratio plays a role.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For discussions of previous versions of this paper, I am indebted to Damir Cavar, John Hawkins, Matthias Schlesewsky and Peter Staudacher. Nilgün Öz participated in re-analyzing the Handke-corpus. NP-PP pairs were extracted from the larger corpus by Ralf Kirmse and Florian Schäfer. The research reported here was supported by the grant INK 12/A1 to the Innovationskolleg "Formal Models of Cognitive Complexity" financed by the Federal Ministry of Science and administered by the DFG.
Bibliography Aoun, Joseph & Yen hui Audrey Li (1993). Syntax of Scope. -Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. - Dordrecht, Foris. Hawkins, John (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenerz, Jürgen. (1977). Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. - Tübingen: Narr. Maienborn, Claudia (1996): Situation und Lokation. Die Bedeutung lokaler Adjunkte von Verbalprojektionen. - Tübingen: Stauffenburg Suchsland, Peter (1993). The Structure of German Verb Projections. In: G. Fanselow (ed.): The parametrization of Universal Grammar, 123-143. Amsterdam: Benjamins.