A formal theory of word order: a case study in West Germanic

Abstract

This thesis has three primary goals . The first goal is to provide a treatrnent of bounded discontinuous constituency and word order in genera! and semi-free word order in particular. Bounded discontinuous constituency is taken to mean the kind of category-bounded discontinuity typically found in the German Mit­telfeld and in Dutch "cross-serial'' dependency constructions. It does not mean unbounded dependencies such as wh-movement. The second goal is to provide an alternative account of cross-linguistic variation in word order (particularly in West Germanic) to the Principles and Parameters approach of Government and Binding Theory. The third goal is to formalise the account in a single homogeneous logical formalism which is not based on rewrite rules or other formal language theoretic machinery.