Prominence Mismatch and Markedness Reduction in Word Order

Abstract

In many 'free' word order languages, it is not uncommon to findfixed word order phenomena in which a certain canonical word orderbecomes fixed under special circumstances. This phenomenon is termedword order freezing. The central dynamic in word order freezing is hierarchy alignment. In Hindi and Korean, for instance, word orderis free when the unmarked association among grammatical functions,semantic roles, case and positions in phrase structure matches therelative prominence relations of these dimensions. However, free wordorder becomes fixed when there is more than onemarked association of elements in these different dimensions of prominencein a single clause. This preference for avoiding highly markedassociations of prominence hierarchies in word order is a case of themore general phenomenon 'markedness reduction' in typologically markedgrammatical contexts. This paper develops an approach to word ordervariation in two scrambling languages, Hindi and Korean, withinOptimality Theory that is capable of subsuming both the free orderingand fixed ordering of constituents under the universal theory ofmarkedness. It accounts in a uniform manner for the universal basis ofword order freezing, while at the same time allowing for the range ofcrosslinguistic and language-internal variation that is observed.