Abstract
One prominent linguistic feature of German is that it exhibits rather flexible word order in the so-called middle field. And while much theoretical research has been carried out on this phenomenon, not much of the insights gained there has been carried over to teaching German in schools (in fact, in many school text books, word order is depicted as rather rigid). Using optimality theory as an example, this article sketches how modern linguistic theories can be used in the classroom to teach aspects of the Grammar of German and to raise the language awareness of the students. For this, we lay out the basics of optimality theory (OT) and how it applies to word order variation, before we sketch different ways how the basic of OT can be taught to younger and older students and why this would be a perfect fit for the officially supported curricula of the German school system.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out. They also mention the production experiment conducted by Skopeteas and Fanselow (2010), who could not elicit non-base word orders from native speakers (based on givenness).
- 5.
In Germany there are the three different school forms after primary school (which usually encompasses first to fourth grade): “Hauptschule” (grade 5–9), “Realschule” (grade 5–10), and Gymnasium (grade 5–12/13).
- 6.
It must be noted that the text books never explicitly state that the SVO order they present is the only viable option; which would be truly outrageous. However, by just presenting this option as the structure of a German sentence, they highly suggest that it is the only option, which is also highly problematic.
- 7.
As we will discuss in Sect. 4, one aspect that gives us hope that flexible word order will be discussed in more detail in future textbooks is that the topological field model is now an official aspect in the new official curriculum of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (KMBW 2016, 32), which lets us expect that other states will catch up with this as well.
- 8.
As a reviewer suggested, this may be due to the fact that there is a gap between what linguistic theories have to offer to explain this and what kind of “language theories” teachers use when teaching. To lessen this gap even so slightly is one of the aims of the article, and the entire volume in which it appears in.
- 9.
By this, we basically mean every phrase with a finite verb, but also infinite verbal phrases. That is, when we have a main clause with one (finite or infinite) embedded clause, we coded these as two sentences.
- 10.
We don’t consider prepositional objects, because they are rather strongly confined to the right side of the middle field directly before possible verbal elements in the so-called right sentence bracket.
- 11.
As a reviewer pointed out, by not coding for negation, we cannot look at effects that negation may have on word order (i.e. due to scope reason, see Bobaljik and Wurmbrand 2012 and Wurmbrand 2008). However, as we will see, there is not much variation in word order to begin with, and we are aiming for a rather coarse quantitative impression here, we think it is safe to leave such detail questions aside for the purposes of this short study.
- 12.
By “verb ≺ subject” we are referring to a configuration in which the verb is in second position and the subject in the middle field, while a different constituent occupies the sentence initial position. In our data, there were no verb-first clauses, like yes-no questions. Thanks to a reviewer for asking for clarification.
- 13.
Chi-square with Yates correction. Chi squared equals .049 with 1 degrees of freedom. The two-tailed P value equals 0.8246.
- 14.
- 15.
Additional constraints maybe unstressed ≺ stressed, topic ≺ comment, and short ≺ long (Hawkins 1994).
- 16.
By “absolutely ranked” we mean that, if one constraint is ranked over another, any violation of the higher one will “trump” an arbitrary number of violations of lower constraints. Of course, two constraints may be tied.
- 17.
While we stipulated the weights of the constraints here, it should be noted that there are ways to calculate the H-value from experimental data, as Keller (2000) shows.
- 18.
Compare this to the two examples in (6) and (8), which have H-values of 0 and −10 respectively.
- 19.
At the end of introducing such scenarios to the students, it could be good exercise to let them come up with more contexts in which a weighted constraint approach can be helpful.
- 20.
Of course, these constraints may be more or less realistic, but we think they are relatable enough for the younger students to get the example.
- 21.
This includes grade 11 to 12 or 13 of the upper schools, which must be completed to achieve the higher education entrance qualification (“Allgemeine Hochschulreife”).
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Gutzmann, D., Turgay, K. (2020). Teaching Word Order Variation with a Constraint-Based View on Grammar. In: Trotzke, A., Kupisch, T. (eds) Formal Linguistics and Language Education. Educational Linguistics, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39257-4_4
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