This paper proposes a description of German word order including phenomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic dependency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without resorting to movement or similar mechanisms.  The aim of this article is to describe the word order of German verbs and their complements. German word order is not free, but based on fairly simple rules, forming what is usually called topological model, which subdivides the sentence into a hierarchy of topological domains that are themselves composed of fields (Vorfeld, Mittelfeld, right bracket…) (Drach, 1937; Bech, 1955) . We start from a syntactic dependency tree, i.e. an unordered tree whose nodes are labeled with the words of the sentence, and whose branches are labeled with syntactic relations among the words (subject, direct object…). The syntactic dependency structure only encodes subcategorization and modification and must be completed by the communicative structure (partition into theme/rheme, focus…), which plays a fundamental role in word order. It permits us to choose among all the different possible orders corresponding to a given dependency structure. In this paper we do not 1 We would like to thank Werner Abraham, Tilman Becker, Ralph Debusmann, Denys Duchier, and Stefan Müller for fruitful discussions. Particular thanks to Igor Mel'cuk for the inspiration of the particular status we give to the phrase structure. pursue this problem any further, but have limited our description to the link between dependency and topology. Note that it is fundamental to our approach that syntactic structure does not include word order. To get the words in order, we group them in a hierarchy of phrases. The nature and the position of these phrases are constrained by our topological model. For instance, a non-finite verb can open two kinds of topological phrases, either a phrase, which we call domain, with positions for all of its dependents, or a restricted phrase, which forms the verb cluster, with no positions for dependents other than predicative elements. These two kinds of phrases must be placed in very different topological positions. The fact that we pass through a (topological) phrase structure in order to relate dependency and word order distinguishes our approach from usual dependency grammars (Mel'cuk & Pertsov, 1987; Bröker, 1998; Kahane et al., 1998; Duchier & Debusmann, 2001 ). The description of German word order closest to our analysis is the HPSG grammar of Kathol (1995; see also Reape 1994), who proposes linearization rules exclusively based on a formalization of the topological structure. However, as required by the formalism he uses, a regular phrase structure, which we do not need in our analysis, still underlies the structures obtained. Our work constitutes a syntactic module which links (unordered) syntactic structures with topological phrase structures. Syntactic structures are related to semantic structures, whereas topological phrase structures are related to phonological structures. In other words, our work lies within the scope of the general framework of Meaning-Text-Theory (Mel'cuk 1988), which considers the modeling of a language as a modular (bi-directional) correspondence between meaning and text. It must be clear that, in contrast to X-bar syntax,
REF apply a hierarchical topological model for generating German word order.
Word Order In German: A Formal Dependency Grammar Using A Topological Hierarchy
Annual Meeting Of The Association For Computational Linguistics
Computer Science