Clause Structure And Word Order In The History Of German

This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into central aspects of clause structure and word order, outlining the different stages of their historical development. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis with descriptive generalizations, supported by a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. Reference is also made throughout to the more traditional descriptive model of the German clause. The volume is divided into three parts that correspond to the main parts of the clause. Part I explores the left periphery, looking at verb placement (verb second and competing orders), the prefield, and adverbial connectives, while Part II discusses the middle field, including pronominal syntax, the order of full NPs, and the history of negation. The final part examines the right periphery with chapters covering basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in historical syntax and the Germanic languages, and for both descriptive and theoretical linguists alike.

This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Cologne, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Introduction: In comparison to English, the German language does not seem to have a specific word order. The distinction between grammatical functions like subjects or objects is mainly due to case-inflection and prepositions. For that reason, word order in German sentences can vary to some extent without a fundamental change in meaning. In the following analysis of German syntax, we are going to consider a possibility of finding the basic German word order. On the basis of the Government and Binding Theory, a widely accepted approach to syntactic analysis, we are going to argue that the structure of a subordinate clause underlies every German sentence. In doing so, we will find that the position of the verb will play a pivotal role. With the help of a clear characterisation, it becomes easier to understand German syntax and to contrast it with other languages such as English. Although the two languages are closely related in historical terms, German sentence structure differs from English SVO (subject-verb-object) word order, which we will examine in chapter III. But before we can embark on the study of English and German syntax, we need to introduce a considerable amount of terminology and syntactic principles, which will form the necessary set of rules in our subsequent analysis. Kurzer Überblick auf Deutsch: Diese Arbeit sucht auf der Grundlage der Government and Binding Theory nach der Basisstruktur eines jeden deutschen Satzes. Während in der englischen Sprache die Subjekt-Verb-Objekt-Struktur vorliegt, und man mit Blick auf deutsche Hauptsätze Gleiches im Deutschen vermuten könnte, so bringt diese Arbeit eine Vielzahl von Argumenten, die eine Subjekt-Objekt-Verb-Struktur in der deutschen Sprache nahe legen. Ungläubig? Eine kurze Übersetzung von „to sing a song“ oder „to watch a movie“ verdeutlicht die unterschiedliche Wortstellung in den beiden Sprachen bereits ganz gut.

A broad coverage of German syntax, providing an in-depth look at object-verb sentence formation in comparison with other languages.

This volume contains a set of articles based on papers selected from those delivered at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL, Edinburgh 2018). It focuses on cutting-edge research in the history of English, while reflecting the diversity that exists in the current landscape of English historical linguistics. Chapters showcase traditional as well as novel methodologies in historical linguistics (the latter made possible by the increasing quality and accessibility of digital tools), work on linguistic interfaces (between segmental phonology and prosody, and syntax and information structure) and work on mechanisms of language change (such as Yang’s Tolerance Principle, on the threshold for the productivity of linguistic rules in language acquisition). The volume will be of interest to those working on the historical phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics of English, language change, corpus linguistics, computational historical linguistics, and related sub-disciplines.

This volume offers an up-to-date survey of linguistic phenomena at the interfaces between syntax and prosody, information structure and discourse – with a special focus on Germanic and Romance – and their role in language change. The contributions, set within the generative framework, discuss original data and provide new insights into the diachronic development of long-burning issues such as negation, word order, quantifiers, null subjects, aspectuality, the structure of the left periphery, and extraposition. The first part of the volume explores interface phenomena at the intrasentential level, in which only clause-internal factors seem to play a significant role in determining diachronic change. The second part examines developments at the intersentential level involving a rearrangement of categories between at least two clausal domains. The book will be of interest for scholars and students interested in generative accounts of language change phenomena at the interfaces, as well as for theoretical linguists in general.

This book addresses a general phenomenon in the European languages: verb second. The articles provide a comprehensive survey of synchronic vs. diachronic developments in the Germanic and Romance languages. New theoretical insights into the interaction of the properties of verbal mood and syntactic structure building lead to hypotheses about the mutual influence of these systems. The diachronic change in the syntax together with changes in the inflectional system show the interdependence between the syntactic and the inflectional component. The fact that the subjunctive can license verb second in dependent clauses reveals further dependencies between these subsystems of grammar. "Fronting finiteness" furthermore constitutes an instance of a main clause phenomenon. Whether "assertion" or "at-issueness" are encoded through this grammatical process will be a matter in the debates discussed in the book. Moreover, information structure appears to be directly related to the fronting of other constituents in front of the finite verb. Questions concerning the interrelations between these various subcomponents of the grammatical system are investigated.

This monograph is the first book-length study on Old High German syntax from a generative perspective in twenty years. It provides an in-depth exploration of the Old High German pre-verb-second grammar by answering the following questions: To what extent did generalized verb movement exist in Old High German? Was there already obligatory XP-movement to the left periphery in declarative root clauses? What deviations from the linear verb-second restriction are attested and what do such phenomena reveal about the structure of the left sentence periphery? Did verb placement play the same role in sentence typing as in the modern verb-second languages? A further major topic is null subjects: It is claimed that Old High German was a partial pro-drop language. All these issues are addressed from a comparative-diachronic perspective by integrating research on other Old Germanic languages, in particular on Old English and Gothic. This book is of interest to all those working in the fields of comparative Germanic syntax and historical linguistics.