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.English and German are more of a mixed nature.InEnglish the dominant direction of verbs, nouns and prepositions is to theright.At first sight, it seems to be to the right in German, too, but if one takestranslation as empirical evidence and is thus forced to include a wider varietyof possible extensions, one will encounter very many examples where thedifferent order of the elements points to an alternative directionality of theEnglish and the German verb phrase.Thus, one can assume that, basically,the English verb phrase extends to the right and the German verb phraseextends to the left.There are other factors superimposed upon this basicdifference, especially in German, which deviates from the basic word orderfor discourse reasons.English is much more constrained in this respect,because of the second important parameter distinguishing the two lang-uages.This is the parameter of configurationality, which has its effect onword order, too, as it determines grammatical relations like subject or objectby structural configurations (see below).However, word order is not only determined grammatically, it is alsodetermined pragmatically by the context/discourse, in which the individualsyntactic structure participates.In contrast to the grammaticalized proper-ties, which are obligatory, the pragmatic conditions are binding only in thesense of optimal relevance.Yet if we ignore the pragmatic conditions and donot choose the structures which are in line with optimal relevance, we cannothelp producing certain effects, too.These are, again, parametrized, thatis, they differ according to the grammatical parametrization underlyingthem.(Control paraphrases, especially analogous translations, illustrate thisextensively.)Questions of order 23The interface between grammatical and discourse conditions is infor-mation structure.It is not only highly relevant for word order, but also forquestions of structural explicitness and sentence boundaries, that is, for allthe topics we are going to look at in the following chapters.It is one of themajor claims of the Key that information structure is grammaticallyparametrized and that our understanding of felicitous translations can beenhanced greatly by making this type of knowledge explicit.We will nowtake a close look at the grammatical and pragmatic details of a pair of simpleand, in the next chapter, a pair of complex sentences.We will use the methodof control paraphrases and a magnifying glass to extract from the examplesall the linguistic and psycholinguistic knowledge needed to describe,generalize and explain felicitous translation and word order.Parametrized beginningsIn German, the position of the finite verb, which is always in the second placein the main clause, can freely be preceded by any other constituent.Thismeans also that the subject can occur in different positions in the sentence.Grammatically seen, the order:Am Anfang der Schöpfung steht die Gestaltbildung.is just as normal as:Die Gestaltbildung steht am Anfang der Schöpfung.There is, however, a difference in the way in which these sentences link upwith their surrounding context.The difference is very much like the differ-ence between the paraphrases:(e) The emergence of form began with creation.and:(f) Creation began with the emergence of form.The contextual link belongs to one of the major criteria of optimal encodingand we will return to it shortly.What we should notice now is the grammatical difference between theGerman options (adverbial or subject) and the English option (only subject).This is no coincidence, but prototypical for the parametrized beginnings ofGerman and English sentences.Although many sentences begin alike forexample with the subject the examples above and most of those followingshow that there are different conditions in English and German controllingthe initial position in a sentence.24 Questions of orderThe difference between the English and the German conditions relate firstof all to what is traditionally called free word order in German.WhileEnglish has relatively tight grammatical restrictions on word order, whichcan be lifted only under very special conditions as we saw with the subjectverb order German is, grammatically seen, much more liberal.Althoughwe can assume something like a canonical order of things in German, too, abasic word order, this basic order is given up much more often in Germanthan in English.In contrast to the two or three special conditions requiring adeviation from the basic word order in English, German word order isregulated by a whole bundle of conditions, most of which are related to theintegration of the sentence into its context.The difference between German and English initial positions belongs toone of the two basic grammatical differences between the two languages.Infact, each language belongs to one or another of an alternative pair ofoptions, free or fixed word order, or a mixture of both.Languages with fixedword orders are mostly configurational languages, which means, as you willrecall from above, that grammatical relations are expressed by certainstructural configurations
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