Information Management as a Factor for Syntactic Variation in the History of German (C06)

• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 232722074

C6 deals with the relation between information density and word order variation in the diachrony of German. After addressing extraposition in phase II, the focus in phase III shifts to constituent order in the ‘middle field’ of German clauses. We investigate whether the linearization of constituents is governed by information-theoretic concepts and information-structural notions such as the Given-New distinction, which we expect to be correlated with surprisal. We compute linguistically-informed language models and compare information profiles of different constituent orders, in particular of adverbials and objects.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding
• Applicant Institution: Universität des Saarlandes
• Project Heads: Professorin Dr. Stefanie Dipper; Professor Dr. Augustin Speyer