Do animate arguments come first ?

Juliette Thuilier (1) , Anne Abeillé (2) , Benoît Crabbé (3)

1 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie
2 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle
3 ALPAGE - Analyse Linguistique Profonde à Grande Echelle ; Large-scale deep linguistic processing

Animacy is known to play a role in postverbal argument ordering for various languages (W02, B08a, B08b). Together with definiteness, pronominality, and shortness, animacy favors positioning an argument first. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish linear ordering from grammatical function or semantic role assignment, since those are also subject to various factors including animacy (K77). In order to investigate the role of animacy in French argument ordering, we limit ourselves to complements of ditransitive verbs with object and indirect object nominal complements. Using statistics on treebanks for language production and a questionnaire study for language perception, we show that animacy seems to play no role in the relative ordering.

Mots clés: animacy; word order; French

Domaines: Linguistique; Linguistique

Juliette Thuilier, Anne Abeillé, Benoît Crabbé. Do animate arguments come first ?. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2011, Sep 2011, Paris, France. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2011, 2011. ⟨hal-01451725⟩