Preferential constraints and the order of postverbal object noun phrases in Spanish ditransitive sentences: definiteness and clitic position
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35622/Keywords:
definiteness, pronominality, spanish, syntax, word orderAbstract
Spanish is a flexible language that allows object complements to be distributed according to the direct object-indirect object and indirect object-dierct object orders. However, in actual discourse, these two orders are not used proportionally. The predominance of one order over the other raises the question of the factors that may motivate the choice of each order. The aim of this work is to determine the impact of definiteness and pronominality on the order of postverbal object noun phrases in ditransitive sentences in Spanish. The theoretical framework is based on the assumptions of quantitative and experimental syntax regarding the study of preferential constraints in corpora. A total of 852 occurrences were analysed for definiteness and 325 for clitic position, extracted from ADESSE corpus. This allowed us to develop contingent tables for each factor and highlight their proportions. To verify the independence between these factors and the order of postverbal object noun phrases, we performed an inferential statistical analysis using the chi-square test and Cramer's V. The results indicate a considerable significance level for definiteness, with a p-value greater than 0.05, whereas the effect of clitic position, with a p-value lower than 0.05, is insignificant. These results should be considered preliminary, as they derive from exploratory study that could be further strengthened through research based on psycholinguistic experimentation.
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