Behaghel's Laws and the Word Order Principles Revisited

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationships of syntactico-semantic structures and pragmatic functions in morphologically case-marked languages such as German and Korean, as opposed to English where configurationality and linear order jointly regulate the grammar. After critically evaluating some previous approaches (Vennemann 1974, 1984; Hawkins 1986, 1994; Müller-Gotama 1994), we suggest that the grammatical properties of a given language can be identified along a continuum scalar model of a subject and topic prominence parameter. By this typological parameter, we propose that grammatical properties of languages, i.e., scrambling, passives, raising and extraction structures, are coded with different motivations at both ends of the polarity. Furthermore we argue that the semantic and syntactic content of the grammatical relations is strongly correlated with the relative ordering of topic and focus positions. Finally we reinterpret Behaghels Laws.