Rhetorical relations and verb placement in Old High German

Chapter 3 extends the investigation of verb placement to other Romance varieties, in order to expand the macro- and micro-typologies identified in Chapter 2. It starts with a description of the placement of the present indicative verb across a selection of varieties of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, European Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese. Following the methodology of Chapter 2, the remainder of the discussion is devoted to the description of cases of microvariation attested across the varieties above, which emerge once a selection of structural and interpretative distinctions are considered, such as lexical and auxiliary verbs, ‘have’ and ‘be’ auxiliaries, finite and non-finite verbs (cf. participle and infinitive), as well as a selection of modally, temporally, and aspectually marked forms (e.g. subjunctive, conditional, past, future, imperfect).

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Romance varieties of the Italian peninsula

10.1093/oso/9780198804642.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Norma Schifano

Keyword(s):

Subjunctive Conditional ◽

Auxiliary Verbs ◽

Italian Peninsula ◽

Verb Placement ◽

Southern Regional ◽

Selection Of

Chapter 2 investigates the differing patterns of verb placement attested across a selection of varieties of the Italian peninsula. After a description of the placement of the present indicative verb in the northern, central, and southern regional varieties of Italian, as well as in a selection of northern, central, upper southern, extreme southern, and Sardinian dialects, a macro-typology of verb placement in the Italian peninsula is drawn. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the description of the microvariation attested across the above varieties which emerges once different verb typologies are considered, such as lexical and auxiliary verbs, ‘have’ and ‘be’ auxiliaries, finite and non-finite verbs (cf. participle and infinitive), as well as a selection of modally, temporally, and aspectually marked forms (e.g. subjunctive, conditional, past, future, imperfect).

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The prefield after the Old High German period

10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Augustin Speyer ◽

Helmut Weiß

Keyword(s):

Ninth Century ◽

Structural Constraints ◽

Old High German ◽

Syntactic Change ◽

The One ◽

Split Cp

The filling of the prefield in Modern German is determined by information-structural constraints such as scene-setting, contrastiveness, and topichood. While OHG does not yet show competition between these constraints, competition arises from MHG onward. This has to do with the generalization of the V2 constraint (i.e. the one-constituent property of the prefield) for declarative clauses, in which context the information-structural constraints are loosened. The syntactic change whose result eventually was the loss of multiple XP fronting comprised a change of the feature endowment of C because the fronting of expletive thô (roughly in the OHG of the ninth century) led to the reanalysis of XP fronting as a semantically vacuous movement whose only function is to check the EPP feature of C. Data from doubly filled prefields in ENHG and post-initial connectives indicate that an articulated split CP-structure, as proposed within the cartographic approach, is also at play in German.

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

10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0004 ◽

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.

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OV versus VO in Old High German

10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0013 ◽

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.

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