Vol. 7 No. 24 (2023): Testing cartographic proposals on locality effects in V2: a quantitative study

Giuseppe Samo. Part of the Special Collection "A Multifactorial Approach to Word Order Change". 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 effect model. By using theory-driven frequencies, we aim to observe the generalisation ability of the two models. We explored ten morpho- syntactically 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.