Language production experiments as tools for corpus construction: A contrastive study of complementizer agreement

The investigation of linguistic phenomena in corpora of spontaneous speech is sometimes hindered by corpus size or by the complexity of the factors influencing their occurrence. Language Production Experiments (LPEs) can specifically elicit such phenomena and can therefore be used to build corpora that allow for their investigation. Yet experiments are a wide category that covers very different tasks, and there is little empirical research that compares speakers’ response behavior to different task types. In this paper, we compare the responses of a group of 22 speakers to a translation task and a completion task, both of which target the syntactic phenomena complementizer agreement (CA). The results indicate that both experimental methods offer legitimate ways to investigate the phenomenon with specific advantages and disadvantages. However, a comparison of results from both tasks allows for insights that a single task could not have provided.

Variation and dynamics of “complementizer agreement” in German

To date, there has been limited empirical research on complementizer agreement (CA). We investigate CA drawing on a corpus of 144 speakers from 13 locations across Austria that was elicited through computer supported language production experiments and recorded in conversations. We investigate the linguistic factors that govern the occurrence of CA, as well as its areal distribution. We further explore the role of CA in speakers’ linguistic repertoires. The study finds evidence for the hypothesis that the (non-)occurrence of CA is strongly dependent on the structure of its hosting C-elements and finds regional patterns. It also identifies CA as a phenomenon which speakers place in a non-standard register. We use the collected data to test a theory of the emergence of CA from clitic pronouns for Bavarian varieties of German.

You Take the Low Road and I’ll Take the High Road: Variation in Agreement Structure in Wisconsin Heritage German

This article presents on interviews with 10 bilingual speakers of American English and Wisconsin Heritage German (WHG), with respect to their licensing of high (NP1) versus low (NP2) agreement. In terms of linguistic typology, English copular constructions license only NP1 agreement, in which the verb agrees in person and number with the first—or syntactically high—nominal element in the clause; Standard German copular constructions license NP2 agreement with the lower nominal element in the clause (though subsequent topicalization of this element is also licit). As a second variable, a subset (7) of these speakers license complementizer agreement (C-agr) in WHG, which obtains from a second, syntactically high agreement structure in the complementizer field, in addition to the canonical German NP2 structure. These data were compared to a control group of the remaining three WHG speakers who did not license C-agr. Data presented here suggest a bi-directional transfer of both NP1 and NP2 agreement structures for both groups of heritage language (HL) speakers. The control group produced a majority of forms consistent with both English and German language-specific grammars. Evidence of NP2 structures in the control group’s English, however, suggests that these speakers are HL-dominant—since NP2 is categorically prohibited in English. WHG speakers with C-agr, in contrast to the control group, produced a majority of NP1 forms in both languages, with the presence of C-agr being a predicting factor in the presence of NP1 agreement in the English of WHG speakers. It is here argued that the presence of C-agr in the HL is similar to the canonical NP1 structures of Standard English, allowing for overlapping licit NP1 structures in both varieties. Data from Assumed Identify Constructions (AICs) suggests that canonical NP2 agreement in C-agr WHG may have been weakened as a result. This research suggests that even superficially English-like grammar may obtain not from a direct transfer from the L2 into the HL, but rather from the interaction of English grammar with the autochthonous grammatical structures of non-standard HLs.

The Wackernagel complex and pronoun raising

In many Indo-European languages, pronouns (and other clitic-like elements) tend to appear in second position or near it. This phenomenon was first described by Jakob Wackernagel, after whom the position is named the Wackernagel position (WP). This chapter describes the emergence of the WP in German where it is the third position following SpecCP and C. Since subject clitics in the WP interact phonologically and morphologically with verbs and complementizers in C, three additional syntactic features (double agreement, complementizer agreement, partial pro-drop) are associated with the WP in German (forming the so-called Wackernagel complex). The chapter surveys the evidence for the existence of the WP in OHG and, to a lesser extent, in MHG, using the additional features as diagnostics. It also contains a new explanation of how complementizer agreement could have emerged.

Introduction to Part II

The chapter provides an overview of the main issues and contributions of Part II of the volume. This part discusses various phenomena concerning the middle field in the historical stages of German. In particular, the discussion concerns the question of the relative order of elements and the factors influencing changes of this order. In the left-most part of the middle field—the Wackernagel position, where light and clitic elements appear—the order of pronouns and their interplay with complementizer agreement is an intriguing topic. Another relevant aspect concerns the order of full NPs and the role that syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors play for the relative order of these constituents over the course of the language history. Finally, negation and its grammaticalization along Jespersen’s Cycle is a phenomenon of the middle field which is discussed in this part of the book.