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Is German V-to-C Movement Really Semantically Motivated? Some Empirical Problems

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Abstract

1. The central issue for a linguistic theory of sentence types is to what extent their meanings (‘sentence moods’) can be compositionally derived from their form. T[ruckenbrodt]'s paper is a valiant, and altogether fascinating attempt to identify a specific contribution of the central formal feature of German sentence types – verb position viz. finite verb movement to C (V-to-C ) – to these meanings. His central claim is that V-to-C is triggered by a context index in C containing crucial sentence mood elements that must be checked in order to yield the appropriate illocutionary interpretations of V-in-C root clauses. In short, according to T, German V-toC has a purely semantic viz. illocutionary motivation. It is this central claim that I will take issue with in the following.

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... The primary motivation for adopting the timing-of-Merge approach among many accounts proposed so far in the literature is that the split timing of Merge at Syntax and Merge at Spell-Out allows us the pliability of representing various manifestations of syntactic embedding and illocutionary force. We show how the proposed syntax sanctions the optionality of MCP or non-MCP in Korean, in addition to the mismatches of root properties at different levels of derivation in German (Reis, 1997(Reis, , 2006Wurmbrand, 2012Wurmbrand, , 2014. Therefore we can capture the intuition on the dynamic nature of MCP as well as the parametric variation between Korean and German. ...
... Based on these assumptions, the syntactic derivations of each clause type predict the different degrees of integration in German (Reis, 1997(Reis, , 2006Gärtner, 2000;Meinunger, 2006;Truckenbrodt, 2006a,b, a.o.). Clause types in German are divided as the following: true Roots (no integration, e.g., weshalb-clauses 'why-cl.'), ...
... On the other hand, the lack of integration of LF and PF in true Root (no integration) clauses is because of separated spell-out domains. This accounts for the mismatches of root properties at different levels of derivation in partial integration (V2) constructions in German that will be discussed in the next section (Reis, 1997(Reis, , 2006Wurmbrand, 2012Wurmbrand, , 2014. ...
Article
The current analysis has important consequences: First, this study has empirical confirmation that the types of MCP-trigger must be extended to comprise the newly identified cases in Korean. Second, the structural ambiguity for MCP constructions in Korean gives us the generalization that MCP operate on syntax, even though they are semantically or pragmatically motivated. Finally, the comparative analysis of genetically distant languages opens the possibility to provide a principled account of the MCP-activating force heads across languages, incorporating the empirical findings of prior research on individual factors such as emotional attitude, evidentiality, or mood.
... (1a), (2b)) and it occurs in object clauses under assertive-like verbs as an alternative to standard clauses introduced by dass 'that' (see Reis 1997, Gärtner 2000, Featherston 2004, Meinunger 2004, Heycock 2006, Truckenbrodt 2006a, b, and Antomo and Steinbach 2010. 4 To be sure, not all root clauses are V2 in German. For example, standard appositive relatives and peripheral adverbial clauses are V-final (Reis 2006, Haider 2010). We will return to this below. ...
... According to Stowell (2005), appositive relatives are a separate assertion. Similarly, Reis (2006) takes appositive relatives and peripheral adverbial clauses to have assertional force. Potts (2005) defined a class of supplements that includes appositions, appositive relatives and parentheticals. ...
... V-final root-clauses in German include appositive relatives and peripheral adverbial clauses. The peripheral adverbial clauses are investigated in detail in Haegeman (2003Haegeman ( , 2004a and, for German, Frey (2011Frey ( , 2012; see also Reis (2006). For appositive relatives, see Hooper and Thompson (1973), Safir (1986), Stowell (2005), and Schlenker (2015). ...
Chapter
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... (1b)) (Brandt 1990;Gärtner 2001a/b;Zwart 2005). We assume that these contexts exhibit different degrees of syntactic integration within the matrix clause: V2 complement clauses are syntactically integrated and weil-clauses are syntactically non-integrated (Reis 1997(Reis , 2006(Reis , 2016Meinunger 2004;Truckenbrodt 2006;Gärtner and Michaelis 2010;Wurmbrand 2012). 4 In the following we sketch the main properties of verb-final RCs and the properties of iV2 structures. ...
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... Let us now make some comparative observations in order to situate the phenomenon under study and understand it in the adequate context. Root clauses headed by subordination markers are not uncommon cross-linguistically. 3 Actually the phenomenon of so called insubordination 4 has been attested in many languages, such as Germanic and Scandinavian (Reis 2006, Truckenbrodt 2006, as well as in Romance (Franco 2009, Ledgeway 2005. 5 A look at the data described shows that the phenomenon has some specific properties. ...
Chapter
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Since the advent of syntactic cartography, left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997), much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian, whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations, while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover, the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and information structure, and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.
... Let us now make some comparative observations in order to situate the phenomenon under study and understand it in the adequate context. Root clauses headed by subordination markers are not uncommon cross-linguistically. 3 Actually the phenomenon of so called insubordination 4 has been attested in many languages, such as Germanic and Scandinavian (Reis 2006, Truckenbrodt 2006), as well as in Romance (Franco 2009, Ledgeway 2005). 5 A look at the data described shows that the phenomenon has some specific properties. ...
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In this paper we study one type of Spanish que (the equivalent to the complementizer "that") that can be shown to belong into the crosslinguistically restricted list of evidentials. In particular, we will claim that it encodes the (most basic) marks of nonfirsthand or indirect (reported) evidence. Our point of departure is certain (apparently) independent clauses of Spanish headed by an overt complementizer (que). Some tests will be presented that support the idea that that one type of que introducing a well specified subset of root sentences shares most of the properties that have been claimed to characterize reportative evidentials in languages such as Quechua (Faller 2002, 2006). As for the properties of reportative que, it will be further shown that it does not encode any features related to epistemic modality (reliability or (im)probability) and we will propose that it is better analyzed as an illocutionary operator, affecting the illocutionary force (in line with Faller 2002 among others) and not as an epistemic modal (Izvorsky 1997 among others). In order to determine the nature of this reportative element and its origin, we contrast it with an old Spanish form, dizque, which exists nowadays in certain modern American varieties. This particle also has the properties of an evidential but behaves as an epistemic modal. In the last sections, we will propose that both evidential particles (que and dizque) are the result of a process of grammaticalization (i.e. 'upward reanalysis', or categorial change, of functional material, in the sense of Roberts and Roussou 2003) of the complex structure headed by a communication verb, dicen que "they say that". We will tentatively describe such process and introduce a hypothesis as to the nature and role of the parameter involved in the claimed reanalysis.
... WVL dagegen, die gewöhnlich in die CP ihres Bezugssatzes integriert sind, können nur dann eine epistemische Einstellungsbegründung ausdrücken, wenn durch eine markierte Prosodie signalisiert wird, dass es sich um einen desintegrierten Gebrauch handelt. Da in diesem Aufsatz die Analyse von WV2 im Mittelpunkt steht, werden wir im Folgenden prosodisch desintegrierte WVL nicht weitere berücksichtigen (zu desintegrierten WVL vgl.Reis 2006).Während WVL präferiert propositional interpretiert werden und die epistemische Lesart nur im Falle eines unintegrierten Gebrauchs und bei entsprechenden Kontextbedingungen zugänglich ist, sind WV2 aufgrund ihrer syntaktischen Struktur optimal desintegriert und damit semantisch und pragmatisch flexibler, so dass sie grundsätzlich erst einmal ambig sind.Sprechaktbezogene Begründung: Wie epistemische Einstellungsbegründungen beziehen sich sprechaktbezogene Begründungen nicht auf die propositionale, sondern auf die illokutionäre Ebene. Während aber epistemische WV2 begründen, wie S zu der im Matrixsatz ausgedrückten Annahme kommt, wird mit sprechaktbezogenen WV2 wie in (24a-c) die Realisierung des mit dem ersten Satz ausgeführten Sprechakts begründet. ...
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... and e.g. Reis (2006) on the semantic motivation of verb movement to C i German. Other works on the relation between illocutionary force and V2 include Andersson (1975), den Besten (1977/1983), Wechsler (1991), Heycock (2006) and Julien (2007). ...
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