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.
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Komagata, N. (2003). Contextual Effects on Word Order: Information Structure and Information Theory. In: Blackburn, P., Ghidini, C., Turner, R.M., Giunchiglia, F. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2680. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44958-2_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44958-2_16
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