A parser for "flexible" word order languages must be substantially data driven. In our view syntax has two distinct roles in this connection: (i) to give impulses for assembling cognitive representations, (ii) to structure the space of search for fillers. WEDNESDAY is an interpreter for a language describing the lexicon and operating on natural language sentences. The system operates from left ...

A number of arguments are given against the traditional word order typology based on the six types SOY, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, and in favour of an alternative typology based on two binary parameters OV vs. VO and SV vs. VS. The arguments given include ones based on various advantages of collapsing VSO and VOS into a single type, the infrequency of clauses containing a noun subject and nou...

Word-order rules impose major constraints on linguistic behavior. For example, adjectives appear before nouns in English, and after nouns in French. This means that constraints on word order must be language-specific properties upheld on-line by the language system. Despite the importance of these rules, little is known about how they operate. We report an influence of word order on the activat...

Strict head-final surface order derives from underlying left-headedness in Ijo , a Niger-Congo language of Nigeria. A word order anomaly in Ijo SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS (SVCs) strongly suggests this, and left-to-right asymmetric c-command among internal arguments of SVCs confirms it. The anomaly is universal among surface right-headed languages with SVCs, indicating that deep left-headedness i...

Abstrae%: A framework for the description of syntactic structures of free word order languages is proposed, based on combination of intuitions underlying immediate constituent description, dependency description and communicative dynamism. The combined approach is compared to its sources and shown superior in descriptive power, esp. in the area of free intermixing of (any number of) adjuncts wi...

In her recent stimulating book NICHOLS (1992) suggests that there are no correlations between word order type and morphological alignment, where by alignment is meant the patterns of argument marking in mono-transitive and intransitive clauses, e.g. accusative, ergative, active, tripartite, hierarchical and neutral. Her findings pertain to the relationship between word order type and the domina...

Existing approaches for evaluating word order in machine translation work with metrics computed directly over a permutation of word positions in system output relative to a reference translation. However, every permutation factorizes into a permutation tree (PET) built of primal permutations, i.e., atomic units that do not factorize any further. In this paper we explore the idea that permutatio...

On the basis of the ordering of bare complements, modifying adjectives and certain adverbs in French, we show that certain constituents are more constrained than others, and we explain this situation in terms of weight, as one of the factors which determine word order. In addition to the distinction between heavy and non-heavy constituents, we propose that there exists a distinction among non-h...