Word order patterns in the Old High German right periphery and their Indo-European origins

Diachronica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Sapp
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Parametric Change

I investigate deviations from the OV order in the OHG texts Isidor and Tatian. Abstracting away from cases of verb-second, post-verbal constituents tend to be heavy or focused. OHG thus has a head-final VP with extraposition of NPs and PPs. Likewise, verbal complexes with the order finite before non-finite are derived by Verb (Projection) Raising. Ancient Indo-European languages are also underlyingly OV with evidence for extraposition. This suggests that OHG inherited the head-final VP, extraposition and even V(P)R from Proto-Indo-European. Because extraposition and V(P)R are at the periphery of grammar, the resulting surface orders have not resulted in parametric change to the VP from Proto-Indo-European to present-day German.

Verb-initial declaratives in Old High German and in later German

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Petrova
Keyword(s):  
Main Part ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Diachronic Syntax ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This chapter investigates the syntactic properties and the pragmatic behaviour of verb-initial declarative clauses in the history of German. The focus is on OHG because in this period, verb-initial declaratives represent a frequent, well-known alternative to canonical verb-second main clauses. It is argued that verb-initial declaratives are native in origin, and that they are derivable under a special interpretation of the verb-second rule. The main part of the chapter deals with the pragmatic properties of verb-initial declaratives in OHG, summarizing the various attempts at explaining the distribution of these orders and showing that further research is needed to arrive at a more adequate understanding of their function in the discourse. The chapter closes up with the discussion of the later development of verb-initial declaratives in German, sketching the controversial treatments of this question in the literature on German diachronic syntax.

Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Right ◽  
Theoretical Analyses

Over roughly the last decade, there has been a notable rise in new research on historical German syntax in a generative perspective. This volume presents a state-of-the-art survey of this thriving new line of research by leading scholars in the field, combining it with new insights into the syntax of historical German. It is the first comprehensive and concise generative historical syntax of German covering numerous central aspects of clause structure and word order, tracing them throughout various historical stages. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis and valid descriptive generalizations with reference also to the more traditional topological model of the German clause with a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. The volume is divided into three parts according to the main parts of the clause: the left periphery dealing with verbal placement and the filling of the prefield (verb second, verb first, verb third orders) as well as adverbial connectives; the middle field including discussion of pronominal syntax, order of full NPs and the history of negation; and the right periphery with chapters on basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex including the development of periphrastic verb forms and the phenomena of IPP (infinitivus pro participio) and ACI (accusativus cum infinitivo). This book thus provides a convenient overview of current research on the major issues concerning historical German clause structure both for scholars interested in more traditional description and for those interested in formal accounts of diachronic syntax.

OV versus VO in Old High German

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana Petrova ◽  
Helmut Weiß
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Landing Site ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Functional Projection ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
The Right

This chapter surveys the word order variation in the right periphery of the clause in OHG. The investigation is based on a corpus including all dependent clauses introduced by the complementizer thaz ‘that’ in the minor OHG documents, a collection of up to forty smaller texts of various genres. The analysis shows that the majority of the data can be explained within a standard OV grammar, assuming additional extraposition of heavy XPs to the right. But apart from these cases, there is evidence supporting the assumption of leftward movement of the verb to an intermediate functional projection vP which is optional with basic OV but obligatory with basic VO. In addition, the chapter presents patterns which evidently involve verb movement to a higher functional head, above vP, and discusses the nature of the landing site of the verb in these cases.

Word-order change in progress: the case of Slovene and Serbo-Croat and its relevance for Germanic

1987 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Related Language ◽  
Slavonic Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Order Change ◽  
The One ◽  
Word Order Change ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Fresh Insight

It will be suggested in this article that Slovene, a South Slavonic language, is on the way to acquiring verb-second (V2) word order. In providing evidence in support of this view I shall compare Slovene, on the one hand, with the closely related language Serbo-Croat and, on the other hand, with relevant details from the history of the Germanic languages. The point of comparing it with Serbo-Croat is to discover the respects in which the word order of these two languages has diverged. Taken together with what is known about the word order of Common Slavonic, the facts emerging from this comparison allow us to identify one major respect in which Slovene has changed and two respects in which it is still changing. At the same time, they reveal a major respect in which Serbo-Croat word order is also changing. The point of comparing Slovene with the Germanic languages is twofold. First, since all the present-day Germanic languages either have or have had V2 word order (Haiman, 1974), it is possible that their history can help us to understand the changes currently taking place in Slovene and to predict how Slovene might change in the future. Secondly, where details of the history of the Germanic languages are poorly understood, the possibility exists of gaining fresh insight into them in the light of the changes that have taken place more recently, or indeed are still taking place, in Slovene. In this connection we shall assess the plausibility of two theories concerning the adoption of V2 word order by the Germanic languages, those of Vennemann (1975) and Wackernagel (1892).

scholarly journals Word-Order Issues in English-to-Urdu Statistical Machine Translation

2011 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bushra Jawaid ◽  
Daniel Zeman
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Parse Tree ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
European Languages

Word-Order Issues in English-to-Urdu Statistical Machine Translation We investigate phrase-based statistical machine translation between English and Urdu, two Indo-European languages that differ significantly in their word-order preferences. Reordering of words and phrases is thus a necessary part of the translation process. While local reordering is modeled nicely by phrase-based systems, long-distance reordering is known to be a hard problem. We perform experiments using the Moses SMT system and discuss reordering models available in Moses. We then present our novel, Urdu-aware, yet generalizable approach based on reordering phrases in syntactic parse tree of the source English sentence. Our technique significantly improves quality of English-Urdu translation with Moses, both in terms of BLEU score and of subjective human judgments.

scholarly journals On the Acquisition of Word Order in WH-Questions in theTromsø Dialect

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.48 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Richardsen Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Wh Questions

This article reports on a study of three children acquiring a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in certain types of WH-questions, verb second (V2) and and verb third (V3). The latter is only allowed after monosyllabic WH-words, while the former, which is the result of verb movement, is the word order found in all other main clauses in the language. It is shown that both V2 and V3 are acquired extremely early by the children in the study (before the age of two), and that subtle distinctions between the two orders with respect to information structure are attested from the beginning. However, it is argued that V3 word order, which should be ìsimplerî than the V2 structure as it does not involve verb movement, is nevertheless acquired slightly later in its full syntactic form. This is taken as an indication that the V3 structure is syntactically more complex, and possibly also more marked.

Modality and Mood in Standard Average European

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniël Van Olmen ◽  
Johan Van Der Auwera
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
European Languages

The chapter discusses the research on the features of the mood and modality systems of European languages that stand a chance of being due to some measure of the areal convergence captured with the term “Standard Average European.” These features are: (i) the compositional nature of the prohibitive, (ii) the number of non-indicative non-imperative moods, (iii) the relation between canonical and non-canonical imperatives, (iv) the use of word order for the interrogative, the (v) multifunctionality, (vi) verbiness, and (vii) grammaticalization of modal markers. While all of these characterize European languages, only features (i), (v), (vi), and (vii) are potential Standard Average European features.

Verb-third in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-98
Author(s):  
Katerina Somers
Keyword(s):  
Old High German ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
The Status ◽  
Finite Verb

Abstract This article investigates the status of so-called verb-final declaratives in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, with a focus on whether clauses in which there is no apparent subordinator and the finite verb occurs later than the expected verb-first or verb-second position can be treated as verb-third (V3) clauses, as they are defined for Old High German in works such as Axel (2007) and Tomaselli (1995). Drawing on a set of 746 clauses, I argue that there is no evidence that the finite verbs in these clauses have undergone verb movement, as is claimed in the aforementioned works, nor are the asyndetic verb-late clauses with a verb in surface third position consistent with the patterns identified in the generative literature for the V3 type.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document