A Quantitative Corpus Study of German Word Order Variation
Kris Heylen · 2005
There is a growing awareness among theoretical linguists from different traditions that there is a problem of objectivity and reliability with traditional introspective data like individual grammaticality judgments or an individual researcher’s assessments of examples. One of the options that linguists have pursued to get a firmer empirical basis for their research is the analysis of usage data as it is increasingly available in large corpora. However, usage data reflects a highly complex interplay of linguistic factors which cannot be analysed without the use of advanced statistical techniques. This paper presents a study into a specific type of word order variation in the Mittelfeld of the German clause as a case study of how a quantitative, statistically based corpus analysis can give a better insight into linguistic phenomena and what its limitations are.