%0 Journal Article
%A Müller, Gereon
%A Englisch, Johannes
%A Opitz, Andreas
%+ Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T Extraction from NP, frequency, and minimalist gradient harmonic grammar  : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000A-C8A8-7
%R 10.1515/ling-2020-0049
%7 2022-07-22
%D 2022
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X Extraction of a PP from an NP in German is possible only if the head<br>noun and the governing verb together form a natural predicate. We show that this<br>corresponds to collocational frequency of the verb-noun combinations in<br>corpora, based on the metric of ΔP. From this we conclude that frequency should<br>be conceived of as a language-external grammatical building block that can<br>directly interact with language-internal grammatical building blocks (like trig-<br>gers for movement and economy constraints blocking movement) in excitatory<br>and inhibitory ways. Integrating frequency directly into the syntax is not an<br>option in most current grammatical theories. However, things are different in<br>Gradient Harmonic Grammar, a version of Optimality Theory where linguistic objects<br>of various kinds can be assigned strength in the form of numerical values (weights).<br>We show that by combining a Minimalist approach to syntactic derivations with a<br>Gradient Harmonic Grammar approach of constraint evaluation, the role of fre-<br>quency in licensing extraction from PP in German can be integrated straightfor-<br>wardly, the only additional prerequisite being that (verb-noun) dependencies qualify<br>as linguistic objects that can be assigned strength (based on their frequency).
%K frequency, gradient harmonic grammar, islands, minimalism,
Optimality Theory
%J Linguistics
%V 60
%N 5
%& 1619
%P 1619 - 1662
%I De Gruyter
%@ 1613-396X0024-3949