What are the factors influencing the ordering of verbal complements in French? Evidence from corpus data, questionnaires and psycholinguistic experiments

Présentation dans le cadre d'un séminaire à la Goethe Universität de Francfort.The goal of this talk is to explore the factors influencing verbal complement ordering in French. In this language, postverbal arguments of ditransitive verbs may appear in NP-PP order or in PP-NP order : (1)a. Paul a donné [une fleur]NP [à Marie]PPb. Paul a donné [à Marie]PP [une fleur]NP"Paul gave a flower to Marie"In order to investigate this phenomenon, I will present evidence from corpus data, questionnaires and psycholinguistic experiments.The results reveal that while the relative length and the verb have a clear influence on constituent ordering, there is convergent evidence indicating that animacy, definiteness and the given/new opposition do not play a role in the phenomenon. The lack of effect of these factors is surprising given that previous studies have shown that more accessible constituents (animate, definite, given) tend to be produced before less accessible constituents (inanimate, indefinite, new) in various languages