We extend a syntactic surface realisation system, which can be trained to choose among word order variants, such that the candidate set includes active and passive variants.

This allows us to study the interaction of voice and word order alternations in realistic German corpus data.

An f-structure abstracts away from word order , i.e.

This paper1 presents work on modelling the usage of voice and word order alternations in a free word order language.

Thus it has been demonstrated that for free word order languages like German, word order prediction quality can be improved with carefully designed, linguistically informed models capturing information-structural strategies (Filippova and Strube, 2007; Cahill and Riester, 2009).

Quite obviously, word order is only one of the means at a speaker’s disposal for expressing some content in a contextually appropriate form; we add systematic alternations like the voice alternation (active vs. passive) to the picture.

Interestingly, the properties that have been used to model argument alternations in strict word order languages like English have been identified as factors that influence word order in free word order languages like German, see Filippova and Strube (2007) for a number of pointers.

Cahill and Riester (2009) implement a model for German word order variation that approximates the information status of constituents through morphological features like definiteness, pronominalisation etc.

We are not aware of any corpus-based generation studies investigating how these properties relate to argument alternations in free word order languages.

This is hardly surprising, given the relatively small training set, and that the “the most difficult languages are those that combine a relatively free word order with a high degree of inflection”, as observed at the recent dependency parsing shared task (Nivre et al., 2007); both of these are characteristics of Latin.

Such a dilemma is not uncommon in languages with relatively free word order .

Most previous work in morphological disambiguation, even when applied on morphologically complex languages with relatively free word order,

However, it does have a relatively free word order , and is also highly inflected, with each word having up to nine morphological attributes, listed in Table 2.