Abstract
The paper aims at the investigation of the phenomenon of free word order. It concentrates on the relationship between (formal) dependencies and word order.
The investigation is performed by means of a semiautomatic application of a method of analysis by reduction to Czech syntactically annotated data. The freedom of word order is expressed by means of a number of necessary shifts in the process of analysis by reduction.
The paper shows that this measure provides a new view of the problem, it is orthogonal to measures reflecting the word order freedom based on a number of non-projective constructions or clitics in a sentence.