Contextual effects on word order: information structure and information theory

  • Authors:

  • Nobo Komagata

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ

  • Venue:
  • CONTEXT'03 Proceedings of the 4th international and interdisciplinary conference on Modeling and using context
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

To account for a type of contextual effect on word order, some researchers propose theme-first (old things first) principles. However, their universality has been questioned due to the existence of counterexamples and the possibility of arguably rheme-first (new things first) languages. Capturing the contextual effects on theme-rheme ordering (information structure) in terms of information theory, this paper argues that word order is affected by the distribution of informativeness, an idea also consistent with counterexamples and rheme-first languages.