Word order asymmetries in NGT coordination: The impact of Information Structure

Abstract

Research on spoken languages shows that the structure of coordination is typically determined by the parallel architecture of the conjuncts involved, a constraint that we refer to as the “Parallel Structure Constraint” (PSC). Apart from syntactic parallelism, the PSC requires that the conjuncts exhibit the same information structure (IS). We address the structure of coordination and the working of the PSC in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), using corpus data. Data extracted from the Corpus NGT reveal that the PSC may be violated in this language in that the order of predicate and argument may vary across conjuncts. We claim that this asymmetry results from IS-related syntactic movement, in particular, fronting of a contrastively focused constituent in the second conjunct. It appears that in NGT, movement is at times preferred over prosodic marking in situ, as it is a more salient foregrounding strategy in such complex (bi-clausal) constructions.