oa Het middenstuk in stukjes - Een onderzoek op basis van een corpus naar de werkzaamheid van grammaticale en communicatieve woordvolgordeprincipes in journalistieke teksten

In the comprehensive Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst the order of constituents in the so-called middenstuk ‘middle field’ of the clause is obtained from the interaction of three principles: the inherence principle, the left-right principle and the complexity principle. In this contribution I will investigate the strength of these principles by analyzing the order of adjacent constituents in a small corpus of sports reports in newspapers. The basic assumption is that the reader of a sports report has a need to size up the middle field in order to find the arguments of the verb. It turns out that most middle fields contain two or more constituents; their order is determined by the inherence principle and, as a consequence, is mainly fixed. This applies especially to adjacent constituents that are both arguments. As for the order of other adjacent constituents the left-right-principle predicts the same order as the inherence principle. In contrast, the complexity principle seems only marginally relevant.