On the Grammaticality of Poetry: The Asyndetic Verb-Late Clause in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch

This article discusses asyndetic verb-late clauses in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, which has long been considered a problematic text within the Old High German corpus in part because of clauses like these. Clauses with a dependent clause’s verbal syntax and no complementizer have been characterized as ungrammatical and/or rare (Behaghel 1932, Schrodt 2004, Axel 2007) and thus have not been included in accounts of early German syntax. I argue that asyndetic verb-late clauses are grammatical and that they can function as main or dependent clauses. Crucially, they demonstrate that main verb fronting was not obligatory in 9th-century German. Although Otfrid marked the main-subordinate asymmetry by various grammatical means, including verbal syntax, I demonstrate that verbal prosody also influenced syntax: Heavy verbs are more frequent in clause-late or -initial position and light verbs in clause-second position, regardless of the main–dependent distinction. I suggest that prosodically-sensitive verbal syntax is characteristic of Otfrid’s exclusively oral vernacular. In contrast, Otfrid imports the concept of differentiating main and dependent clauses grammatically from Latin. The Evangelienbuch, then, represents an attempt to transform an oral vernacular into a written language by imposing, however imperfectly, the norm of grammatically distinct main and dependent clauses onto a prosodically-sensitive verbal syntax.*

Zentrum und Peripherie in der deutschen Syntax.

In Linguistik online 2021, I presented a four-level centre-periphery model of German syntax (with the categories “prototype”, “variants”, “competitive forms” and “free stylistic variation”) and tested and refined it on the basis of two well-researched grammatical phenomena, conditionality and passive structures. In the present paper, this model is applied to the sentence types of German, with comparative side glances at English and French. The model proves to be particularly fruitful in the functional area of exclamation, where a great variety of forms can be observed. I argue here that scientific grammars should not only record the form inventory of sentence types but should supplement this with information on their frequency of occurrence, especially with key figures on the relative proportions of the individual structures in their functional field of competition, broken down by different communicative situations or text types. The motto for the grammar writing of the future should be: From the “structures” to the “structures in use”.

Entwicklung der Verbstellung beim fortgeschrittenen Erwerb des Deutschen als Fremdsprache

This article investigates the acquisition of verb placement in German as a foreign language at an advanced stage of development. The main objective of the investigation is to analyse written and spoken language production in terms of the use of subject-verb-inversion, verbal bracket, and verb-final placement in subordinate clauses. The results reveal a discrepancy between written and spoken language production with respect to correct usage of the verb placement rules. While correctness in the written production task exceeded 97% for all phenomena, the oral translation task generated less correct sentences, but only for inversion and verb-final placement. The non-target usage of inversion and verb-final pattern in spoken production points to processing problems when translating from Polish into German, which are further confirmed by lower accuracy for these two phenomena. At the moment of testing, the verbal bracket has already been acquired, which is in line with the universal developmental sequence in the acquisition of German syntax.

Situating Valency Theory in functional-cognitive space

This article builds on the work reported in Butler and Gonzálvez-García (2014), in which 16 functional and/or cognitive/constructionist theories were compared on the basis of questionnaires completed by experts and a reading of the literature on each approach. The aim is to extend this work to cover Valency Theory (VT henceforth), arguably the most widely used approach to the study of German syntax. We first report on a statistical analysis (correlation, multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis) of the data from the questionnaires completed by two VT experts, in relation to those completed by experts in other approaches. We then present an analysis of each item in the questionnaire in relation to VT, leading to a positive or negative evaluation for each questionnaire item. The results are again analysed statistically. The picture that emerges is of a theory which, though distinctive, has clear relationships with a broad group of cognitively-oriented approaches.

Introduction

The introductory chapter provides important background information for the readers of the volume. It describes the aims of the volume, which is the first comprehensive and concise generative historical syntax of German. However, the contributions are not only aimed at researchers in the field, but in giving a basic overview of the respective topics and relating them to more descriptive and traditional accounts, the book is also suited for academic teaching, e.g. as a central text book in courses on historical German syntax. The chapter then gives an overview of the syntax of German, introducing the topological model widely used in more traditional accounts and the generative analysis of German clause structure. Finally, it provides an overview of the history of High and Low German including information on basic grammatical features, the textual evidence and central reference books and digital corpora for each period.

Idiome und ihre kommunikative Leistung

The aim of this paper is to analyze the communicative function of idioms and their constituents in the information structure of an utterance. Usually idioms tend to occupy the final position in a sentence, which correlates with their inherent rhematic properties. However, structural transformations such as fronting, passivization and conversion can lead to changes in their communicative status. Among such changes, we single out (a) topicalization or thematization of the fronted sentence constituent, (b) its focusing or emphatic rhematization, (c) focusing of the postponed constituent, or (d) rhematization of the sentence as a whole, etc. In spite of their lexical stability, idioms make use of the possibilities provided by German syntax. This allows them to contribute to the communicative structuring of utterances.

Syntactic restructuring in heritage grammars

In order to elucidate the structure of heritage grammars, this paper presents an analysis of word order variation in Moundridge Schweitzer German (MSG), a moribund heritage variety of German spoken in South Central Kansas. Based on elicited production data and an acceptability judgment task, we show that the current state of the MSG grammar maintains the asymmetric German verb-second (V2) and verb-final (V-final) word-ordering closely tied to specific pragmatic information associated with clause-types and complementizers. Extensive contact with English does not lead to adoption of English word order; rather, it occasions restructuring of German word order within the constraints of German syntax. We model these findings in a syntactic analysis following recent proposals by Putnam & Sánchez (2013) and Polinsky (2011) that challenge the notion of ‘incomplete acquisition’ as a way to conceptualize heritage language acquisition.

Annotierte Korpora für die Historische Syntaxforschung: Anwendungsbeispiele anhand des Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch

This article addresses the use of annotated corpora for research in historical German syntax, introducing the