What Do the Data in Prague Dependency Treebank Say about Systemic Ordering in Czech?

A hypothesis of systemic ordering, proposed by Petr Sgall et al (1980) in the framework of functional generative description as a precise formulation of the notion of natural word order, is tested in part against Czech data from the Prague Dependency Treebank, in which 800,000 words of text are annotated for features of syntax, morphology, & information structure. The hypothesis predicts that, whenever surface order violates the systemic order of agent + addressee + patient, the topic-focus articulation is distributed across the point of violation; eg, if patient precedes agent, then the patient is contextually bound (topic) & the agent, contextually unbound (focus). Results show six sentence types that contradict this prediction in that the surface order of two elements in focus violates systemic order; it is concluded that the theory of topic-focus articulation must be expanded to include formal & lexical constraints on surface word order, in particular heavy complements, prepositional phrases, & the copula byt. References. J. Hitchcock