Testing cartographic proposals on locality effects in V2

A quantitative study

Abstract

In this paper, we explore quantitative and computational methods to compare two theories of locality effects in non-subject fronting in V2 environments. We test the predictions in locality effects in grammatical clauses of (i) a ”bottleneck effect” model and (ii) a ”standard featural Relativized Minimality effects” model. By using theory-driven frequencies, we aim to observe the generalisation ability of the two models. We explored ten morphosyntactically annotated treebanks for seven Germanic languages and one treebank for Old French. Our results support the predictions of a model stipulating standard featural Relativized Minimality effects in non-subject fronting.