The Object Order in the German Middle Field through the Lens of Information Theory: A Diachronic Study

This study examines how Uniform Information Density and the lexical verb position, predicting valency knowledge and disambiguation, influence the order of nominal dative and accusative objects in German from the fifteenth to twentieth century using corpus data and regression analysis. As a measure of sentence uniformity, DORM (Deviation of the Rolling Mean, Cuskley et al. 2021) is applied on unigram lemma surprisal values of each clause containing dative and accusative objects. The verb position is determined using the POS-information from the corpora. Further factors included in the analysis are the givenness status of the two objects, their length difference, and the period in which the texts were published. In historical data and with uneven information profiles, Acc>Dat is expectedly more frequent in SVO while Dat>Acc is more common in SOV. In modern German, Dat>Acc is dominant independent of the verb position with uneven information profiles. The known influence of givenness is also attested. A balance between the frequency of grammatical construction and the lexical uniformity of the information profile can explain the results.*