An LFG Approach to Word Order Freezing

Word order freezing is a linguistic phenomenon by which normally free word order is frozen in the absence of disambiguating case information. It has been said to exist in Russian, Dutch, Korean, and many other languages.

Word order freezing has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, and it is often claimed that the phenomenon should be treated as part of processing or as purely stochastic. Others maintain that it should be treated syntactically, but it has received relatively little attention in LFG. Indeed, word order freezing presents unique challenges within LFG since it resists a purely monotonic structural description. Using a notion of case indeterminacy as in Dalrymple et al. (2009), in this paper I propose a novel analysis of the phenomenon that I believe to be the first full account of word order freezing in a pure LFG framework. I will also compare it to a more intuitive account that I have developed, which uses LFG modified with a single OT constraint.