There's a large body of variationist research on Brazilian Portuguese, some of which touches on questions of word order, often as an independent variable which affects other variable processes. Thus plural marking across the NP is variable, and depends on sequential position and position with respect to the head. Generally speaking, NP initial and pre-head positions are very likely to get plural markers, whereas post-head positions and NP-finals are relatively unlikely. Similarly, verbal plural marking is variable, and is sensitive to subject position: preverbal subjects favor deletion, especially when immediately adjacent, but agreement with postposed subjects is rare. Most of this work is written in Portuguese, but some of it is addressed in my Penn dissertation, which was written in English (1981). Also, I believe Tony Naro wrote something about heavy NP shift in Portuguese, and Claudia Roncarati did a study of placement of negatives. There may be some work on word order by Fernando Tarallo as well.

Greg Guy

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Evie Coussé <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

I am looking for references on (multivariate) corpus studies of word order alternations. I know of previous corpus research on:

·         heavy NP shift in English (by Wasow)

·         particle placement with phrasal verbs in English (Gries, Cappelle)

·         relative ordering of prenominal adjectives in English (Wulff)

·         free placement of auxiliary and past participle in verb clusters in Dutch (De Sutter)

·         relative placement of pronominal direct and indirect objects in German (Heylen)

·         extraposition of PPs in Dutch and German (Jansen, De Sutter & Van de Velde)

I am particularly interested in references to (a) other types of word order alternations, (b) other languages than English, German and Dutch, (c) other types of data than standard language (e.g. dialects and historical data).

Thank you for your response!

Kind regards,

Evie Coussé

University of Gothenburg

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http://www.eviecousse.be

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Gregory R. Guy
Department of Linguistics
New York University

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