Abstract
The paper describes an ongoing experiment consisting in the attempt to quantify word-order properties of three Indo-European languages (Czech, English and German). The statistics are collected from the syntactically annotated treebanks available for all three languages.
The treebanks are searched by means of a universal query tool PML-TQ. The search concentrates on the mutual order of a verb and its complements (subject, object(s)) and the statistics are calculated for all permutations of the three elements.
The results for all three languages are compared and a measure expressing the degree of word order freedom is suggested in the final section of the paper. This study constitutes a motivation for formal modeling of natural language processing methods.