Extraction from NP, frequency, and minimalist gradient harmonic grammar

Abstract

Extraction of a PP from an NP in German is possible only if the head noun and the governing verb together form a natural predicate. We show that this corresponds to collocational frequency of the verb-noun combinations in corpora, based on the metric of ΔP. From this we conclude that frequency should be conceived of as a language-external grammatical building block that can directly interact with language-internal grammatical building blocks (like triggers for movement and economy constraints blocking movement) in excitatory and inhibitory ways. Integrating frequency directly into the syntax is not an option in most current grammatical theories. However, things are different in Gradient Harmonic Grammar, a version of Optimality Theory where linguistic objects of various kinds can be assigned strength in the form of numerical values (weights). We show that by combining a Minimalist approach to syntactic derivations with a Gradient Harmonic Grammar approach of constraint evaluation, the role of frequency in licensing extraction from PP in German can be integrated straightforwardly, the only additional prerequisite being that (verb-noun) dependencies qualify as linguistic objects that can be assigned strength (based on their frequency).