Experimental Studies in Linguistics

This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus fre-quencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative con-structions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 in-troduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred. 1 Markedness in OT In Optimality Theory, grammaticality is derived from markedness in the sense that it is the relative ranking of markedness constraints that determines whether a structure is grammatical or not. Consider the following simple system of two ∗ The division of labour among the authors was as follows: Zugck carried out the low-level work on the corpus, data sample extraction, counting, systematising the numerical results, some calculations. The higher level linguistic analysis was done by Vogel