Distancing the Constraints on Syntactic Variations

This paper investigates syntactic variations in English such as Dative Alternation, Particle Inversion, and Object Postposition (Heavy NP Shift) within the framework of Optimality Theory, and shows that the same set of morphological, informational, and processing constraints affect all these variations. In particular, it shows that the variants that used to be regarded as ungrammatical are in fact used fairly often in reality, especially when processing or informational conditions are met, and therefore, grammatical judgment may not be always categorical but sometimes gradient. It is argued that the notion of distance in constraint ranking in stochastic OT can effectively explain the gradience and variability of grammaticality in the variation phenomena.