How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses?: A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity

It is almost a commonplace that word order in the midfield of German clauses is flexible. Although statements to this effect do not claim that “anything goes”, they suggest that word order variability in German clauses is considerably greater than, for example, in Dutch and English clauses. Few systematic empirical studies of the actual amount of variation that go beyond the intuition of the individual linguist have been published as yet. In the present paper, we adduce empirical data drawn from a corpus study on the linear order of Subject (SB), Indirect Object (IO) and Direct Object (DO) in German subordinate clauses.

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