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This paper presents a left-branching constructionalist grammar design where the phrase structure tree does not correspond to the conventional constituent structure. The constituent structure is rather reflected by embeddings on a feature STACK. The design is compatible with incremental processing, as words are combined from left to right, one by one, and it gives a simple account of long distance dependencies, where the extracted element is assumed to be dominated by the extraction site. It is motivated by psycholinguistic findings.
This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus frequencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative constructions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 introduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred.
This paper is part of a research project on OT Syntax and the typology of the free relative (FR) construction. It concentrates on the details of an OT analysis and some of its consequences for OT syntax. I will not present a general discussion of the phenomenon and the many controversial issues it is famous for in generative syntax.