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"Aber immer alle sagen das" The Status of V3 in German: Use, Processing, and Syntactic Representation
Abstract
Für das Deutsche wird gemeinhin eine strikte V2-Beschränkung angenommen, die für deklarative Hauptsätze besagt, dass sich vor dem finiten Verb genau eine Konstituente befinden muss. In der Literatur werden häufig Beispiele angeführt, in denen sich zwei Konstituenten vor dem finiten Verb befinden und die somit gegen die V2-Beschränkung verstoßen. Diese syntaktische Konfiguration, so das Argument, führt zu Ungrammatikalität: (1) *Gestern Johann hat getanzt. (Roberts & Roussou 2002:137) Die Bewertung in (1) fußt jedoch nicht auf empirischer Evidenz, sondern spiegelt ein introspektives Urteil der Autor*innen wider. Daten zum tatsächlichen Sprachgebrauch zeigen, dass Sätze wie in (2) im Deutschen durchaus verwendet werden: (2) Aber immer alle sagen das. [BSa-OB, #16] Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit dem Status dieser V3-Deklarativsätze im Deutschen. Der Status wird aus drei einander ergänzenden Perspektiven auf Sprache untersucht: Sprachverwendung, Akzeptabilität und Verarbeitung. Hierzu werden Daten, die in einer Korpus-, einer Akzeptabilitäts- und einer Lesezeitstudie erhoben wurden, ausgewertet. Basierend auf den empirischen Befunden diskutiere ich V3-Modellierungen aus generativer Sicht und entwickle einen Modellierungsvorschlag aus konstruktionsgrammatischer Sicht. Die Arbeit zeigt, dass die Einbeziehung von nicht-standardsprachlichen Mustern wichtige Einblicke in die sprachliche Architektur gibt. Insbesondere psycholinguistisch gewonnene Daten als empirische Basis sind essenziell, um mentale sprachliche Prozesse zu verstehen und abbilden zu können. Die Analyse von V3 zeigt, dass solche Ansätze möglich und nötig sind, um Grammatikmodelle zu prüfen und weiterzuentwickeln. Untersuchungen dieser Art stellen Grammatikmodelle in Frage, die oft einer standardsprachlichen Tradition heraus erwachsen sind und nur einen Ausschnitt der sprachlichen Realität erfassen. V3-Sätze entpuppen sich nach dieser Analyse als Strukturen, die fester Bestandteil der Grammatik sind.
... spoken German (cf. Schalowski 2015, Bunk 2020), we follow Sluckin & Bunk (2023) who consider these a last-resort operation when speakers omit the adverb(ial) in the initial numeration (see also Haegeman & Greco 2018, Greco & Haegeman 2020, merging them late in, Spec,FrameP (Spec,CP 2 for our purposes). Finally, we assumed that satisfaction of Kiezdeutsch C 2 's generalized EPP feature via (external) Merge in its spec deactivates its ability to probe downwards, thus producing a complementary distribution between framesetters and accusative DPs in V3. ...
... Having been hidden in vernacular language, this pattern might have gotten over-looked and had to be rediscovered via the more dynamic settings of multilingual speech communities. (Wiese & Müller 2018:16) Two factors underpin this view; firstly, monolingual speakers of German appear to produce V3 rarely following the Adv→Subject→V FIN (Schalowski 2015, Bunk 2020Wiese et al. 2020) 16 . Secondly, framesetter-initial V3 patterns in Early New High German (ENHG) (37) (Speyer 2008) We focus on ENHG data, as neither spoken German nor the relevant Berlin dialect syntactically derive from MLG (cf. ...
... For instance, Meisel (2009Meisel ( , 2011b and Meisel et al. (2013) argue that exposure to German after 4;0 can result in some nontarget uses of morphosyntactic inflection, such as case, gender, and other ϕ-related agreement marking (see also Tsimpli & Hulk 2013, Tsimpli 2014, Unsworth et al. 2014, Unsworth 2016. We find several errors in gender-marking (44), finiteness inflection (45) We also find rare examples indicating competition between VO/OV, for example, a postverbal particle after a nonfinite form (47), which is typically diagnostic of a leftheaded VP (Fuß 2018 (Bunk 2020, Breitbarth 2022. Consequently, the similarity of V3 across different linguistic scenarios is beyond coincidental and poses the question as to why such orders seem to emerge repeatedly. ...
This study revisits the V3 linearization AdvP>Subject>finite verb in Kiezdeutsch, comparing it to resumptive verb-third Left Dislocation and Hanging Topic Left Dislocation. Using corpus data, preverbal object DPs are shown to almost never occur across verb-third distributions, yet preverbal nominative subjects and spatio-temporal elements are unproblematic. This behavior is argued to involve a low C-domain position encoding a Subject of Predication requirement (see Cardinaletti 2004) tied to aboutness and nominative Case-assigning features, but not a strict D-related subject EPP. Based on comparison with other corpora and analysis of metadata, speakers from non-German-speaking homes, namely successive bilinguals, are argued to have innovated this property. A novel account is suggested for the emergence of V3 based on claims that it results from a natural informational order (Wiese et al. 2020), which is formalized as a Minimal Default Grammar (Roeper 1999) available to children before they fully acquire CP and TP. Children acquiring a V2 language must either reject V3 or incorporate it into a V2 syntax. Lacking adequate counterevidence in their input, Kiezdeutsch speakers do the latter.
... Some scholars consider V3 a historically consistent pattern inherited from a historical stage of the language ( "Having been hidden in vernacular language, this pattern might have gotten overlooked and had to be rediscovered via the more dynamic settings of multilingual speech communities." (Wiese & Müller 2018:16) Two factors underpin this view; firstly, monolingual speakers of German appear to produce V3 rarely following the Adv→Subject→VFIN (Schalowski 2015(Schalowski , 2017Bunk 2020;Wiese et al. 2020) 17 . Secondly, framesetter-initial V3 patterns in Early New High German (ENHG) (45) (Speyer 2008) We focus on ENHG data, as neither spoken German nor the relevant Berlin dialect syntactically derive from MLG (cf. ...
... However, this does fully explain why the resilience of V3 which emerges repeatedly in the speech of L2 adults (Clahsen & Muysken 1986), late successive bilinguals (Rothweiler 2006;Jabnoun 2006;Sopata 2010), Heritage speakers of V2 varieties (Alexiadou & Lohndal 2018), speakers of Kiezdeutsch and similar urban vernaculars (Wiese 2013;Walkden 2017;Meelen et al. 2020), early L1 CLA (Tracy 1991;Platzack 2001;Tracy & Thoma 2009), and also in synchronic and historical V2 varieties which allow V3 micro-variationally (Haegeman & Greco 2018;Hinterhölzl 2017;Wolfe 2019). As noted in Section 7.1, infrequent examples are even found in spoken German (Bunk 2020;Breitbarth 2022Breitbarth , 2023. Consequently, the similarity of V3 across different linguistic scenarios is beyond coincidental and poses the question as to why such orders seem to emerge repeatedly. ...
... Roeper 1999). As the C-Phase unfurls into separate C-and T-domains, multilingual Kiezdeutsch speakers incorporate V3 into a V2 grammar, while monolingual SG-acquirers tend to reject it; yet, colloquial German may be following suit (Bunk 2020;Breitbarth 2022Breitbarth , 2023. ...
This study revisits the V3 linearisation AdvP>Subject>finite verb in Kiezdeutsch, comparing it to resumptive verb-third Left Dislocation and Hanging Topic Left Dislocation. Using corpus data, preverbal object DPs are shown to almost never occur across verb-third distributions, yet preverbal nominative subjects and spatio-temporal elements are unproblematic. This behaviour is argued to involve a low C-domain position encoding a Subject of Predication requirement (cf. Cardinaletti 2004) tied to aboutness and nominative Case-assigning features, but not a strict D-related subject EPP. Based on comparison with other corpora and analysis of metadata, speakers from non-German speaking homes, i.e. successive bilinguals are argued to have innovated this property. A novel account is suggested for the emergence of V3 based on claims that it results from a natural informational order (Wiese et al. 2020), which is formalized as a Minimal Default Grammar (Roeper 1999) available to children before they fully acquire CP and TP. Children acquiring a V2 language must either reject V3 or incorporate it into a V2 syntax. Lacking adequate counter-evidence in their input, Kiezdeutsch speakers do the latter.
(Journal of Germanic Linguistics)
... "genuine multiple prefields", i.e. V3-sentences with sentence-initial adverbials (Bunk 2020, Schalowski 2017). ...
... This particular grammatical pattern has received much attention in recent years, and there is mounting evidence that V3-structures have always been used, not just as slips of the tongue but in systematic and cross-linguistically comparable ways. Thus, V3-structures have been described for monolingual Wisconsin German , heritage Low German in the US (Bender 1980), and in spoken High German (Breitbarth 2021, Bunk 2020, Schalowski 2017 Generally speaking, V3-structures usually occur with a sentence-initial (temporal) adverb (Te Velde 2017a: 301), but initial constituents may also be determiner phrases (DPs), prepositional phrases (PPs), or complementizer phrases (CPs) (Walkden 2017). 50 The constituent immediately in front of the verb seems to be much more restricted than the sentence-initial constituent and is almost always a (pronominal) subject (Walkden 2017: 55). ...
... Although and Breitbarth (in press) show the prosodic exposition of discourse markers and frame setters in V3-sentences, this is not the only prosodic pattern that has been described. As Wiese & Müller (2018) and Bunk (2020) show, adverbials serving as discourse markers (43) and adverbials serving as frame setters (44) Based on a construction-grammar approach, Bunk (2020: 145-146) suggests two different schemata to capture the linguistic and semantic characteristics of both discourse marker and frame setter patterns (see Figures 3-2 and 3-3 for the translated models, including full descriptors instead of acronyms). For both constructions, the pragmatic use is similar, as they typically occur in spoken informal or semi-informal interactions. ...
Finite verb placement in German(ic) contact languages has received heightened attention in recent years. In particular, the occurrence of main clauses with two preverbal constituents instead of the “canonical” only one, or verb-third word order (V3), has attracted researchers’ interest especially for Germanic contact varieties. Although previous studies of V3 in urban vernaculars, heritage languages and monolingual populations have used a variety of different methodologies, and proposed an abundance of theoretical approaches, to date, there has been no study (1) using variationist methodology, (2) exploring the contributions of prosody and information-structure to V3 syntax, (3) offering a longitudinal perspective, and (4) focusing on heritage Low German in the United States. This dissertation seeks to fill these gaps.
The dissertation is based on a total of 58 interviews recorded in 1998 and 2018/19 with 46 heritage East Frisian Low German speakers from Grundy County and surrounding counties in Iowa, USA. The community was established in the USA in the mid-19th century and is now acutely endangered by communal language shift to English as the majority language. In addition to a detailed sociolinguistic history of this speech community, the dissertation presents a quantitative description of the linguistic and social factors contributing to the use of V3-structures.
A statistical analysis of more than 2000 main clauses confirms the presence of a sentence-initial adverbial (i.e. a temporal adverb) to be the most significant constraint on V3-structures. The exploration of a more narrowly defined data-set of more than 600 main clauses with sentence-initial adverbials reveals both linguistic and social factors contributing to the variable use of V3-structures. Most notably, V3-structures are most strongly favored by prosodically separated adverbials which occur in a preceding intonation unit from the finite main verb and/or are followed by a pause. An additional factor that favors V3-structures is greater prosodic weight (i.e., more preverbal syllables). These prosodically separated adverbials may serve to highlight a contrast between information from the previous discourse and new (contrary) information in the subsequent intonation unit, and seem to be consciously employed as effective narrative devices by the speakers.
Also promoting V3 are verbs conjugated in the present tense. From a more exploratory survey of the data, it emerges that V3-structures are preferred in longer, uninterrupted narrations, where a narrative present tense may be used as a storytelling strategy. Moreover, V3-structures may be more frequently used when the subject has been mentioned in the 10 preceding intonation units but importantly is different from the subject referent in the immediately preceding intonation unit. In other words, V3-structures seem to be more likely, if the subject is topical and accessible but needs to be “reactivated” after an utterance with a different subject referent.
Concerning the social factors, it is shown that men use V3-structures markedly more often than women and that the usage of V3-structures increased over time, both with regard to speakers’ year of birth and between the two points of data collections. Nevertheless, because the usage of V3-structures remains constrained by linguistic factors and is systematically motivated by discourse-pragmatic needs, these structures do not occur arbitrarily. Thus, the observed verb placement variation seems to be part of an ongoing communal language change.
... Walkden (2017) finds that young monolingual speakers produce significantly fewer and more unreliable instances of %V3; it was not clear that these instances were not errors. However, limited instances of %V3 have also been attested for adult spoken German (Schalowski 2015(Schalowski , 2017Wiese and Rehbein 2016;Wiese and Müller 2018;Bunk 2020;Wiese et al. 2020). Wiese and Müller (2018) and Bunk (2020) consider %V3 a core but overlooked feature of the spoken German repertoire, beyond its notoriety in Kiezdeutsch. ...
... For more standard-conforming spoken data representative of monolingual adult spoken norms, I draw on the Tübinger Baumbank des Deutschen/Spontansprache (TüBa-D/S) 'Tübinger tree bank of German/spontaneous speech', a corpus of semi-informal telephone conversations of a transactional nature (Hinrichs et al. 2000). The data in this work has either been mined for this study using TüNDRA (Martens 2013), or is drawn from previous studies by Sluckin and Bunk (forthcoming) and Bunk (2020). I focus on the 'multiethnic' subcorpus of KiDKo. ...
... Furthermore, manual analysis was also required in order to distinguish subject and object DPs/pronouns which are not distinguished in the tagging. For %V3 in TüBa-D/S, I draw chiefly on data presented in Bunk (2020), also discussed by Schalowski (2015). This is in part because the TüNDRA interface does not permit exporting of the data. ...
This dissertation approaches the syntax of structures involving non-canonical subjects and non-canonical subject positions. In particular, I investigate two phenomena: Locative Inversion (LI) in English, French, Italian, and Hebrew; and well-known verb-third violations of the verb-second (V2) rule in Kiezdeutsch, an urban contact variety of German. In LI a spatio-deictic XP appears to occupy the preverbal canonical subject position, while the canonical nominative subject DP surfaces in a postverbal inverted position. From a theoretical and empirical perspective, I compare the distribution of different covert and overt arguments participating in LI and the availability of LI in embedded and matrix contexts crosslinguistically. The second case study concentrates on remarkable Kiezdeutsch V2 violations, as they appear to follow a regular order of [frame-setting adverb → Subject → finite verb]; this is remarkable not only on account of it violating an otherwise strict V2 requirement, but it also indicates the innovation of a subject position that Standard German does not have. I carry out a corpus study and find that an apparent subject requirement extends to other verb-third resumptive- dislocation phenomena, yet it is shown that we cannot understand this requirement in the sense of an EPP position associated purely with nominative DP subjects. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation develops and applies a theory of subject requirements, which is able to account for the breadth of investigated crosslinguistic variation in LI and the presence or absence of a high clausal subject requirement in verb-third V2-violations in Kiezdeutsch and more standard varieties of German. Ultimately, I make use of finite differences across C and T in the distribution of D, φ, and discourse-related δ-features (cf. Miyagawa 2017) features via different inheritance options from the phase head. I demonstrate that the presence of non-canonical subjects in LI and the presence of canonical subjects in a seemingly non-canonical subject position in Kiezdeutsch can both be derived via variation in the placement of a δ-feature with a specification for Subject of Predication orthogonal to typical EPP requirements related to D and φ.
... (9) Bei uns in der Schule einer heißt "SPK15". Bunk (2020) showed that V3 of the type Adv-STOPIC-VFIN is associated with faster reading times than Adv-Obj-VFIN, pointing to a cognitive preference for preverbal subjects in V3. This may derive from extra-syntactic interface requirements in V3 (cf. ...
... This may derive from extra-syntactic interface requirements in V3 (cf. Wiese et al. 2020, Bunk 2020) which we return to in section 4. Nonetheless, speakers from monethnic speech communities appear to use considerably less V3 than Kiezdeutsch speakers (Walkden 2017. Given typological variation across Germanic and beyond (Wolfe , 2018(Wolfe . ...
... In favour of the first position is the fact that Frame-Setters are not necessarily referential (Frey 2003: 168 Let us now briefly return to the question of why more than a coincidental number of SG speakers also produce V3 in their grammars. Indeed, work by Bunk (2020) and Wiese et al. (2021) has shown V3 to be more diffused than previously thought in the spoken language of "typical" monolingual Germans, albeit considerably less frequent in TüBa-D/S than in KiDKo-mu, i.e., 0.2% vs 0.85% of matrix clauses (Sluckin 2021: 257). While formal accounts have worked on the basis that V3 is unavailable beyond Kiezdeutsch, we are open to a level of microvariation in the speaker population (cf. ...
(final pre-publication copy)
(Former working title: Resolving permissible and impermissible V3 in Kiezdeutsch: resumption and beyond)
This chapter presents an investigation of V2 violations in the German contact varietyKiezdeutsch, making comparison with spoken and written Standard German (SG). We undertake a corpus study analyzing the distribution of V3-inducing resumption strategies otherwise unproblematic in SG: adverbial resumption, Left Dislocation, and Hanging TopicLeft Dislocation. Unlike for SG, little is known about resumption strategies in Kiezdeutsch, yet we find similar behavior for spoken SG and Kiezdeutsch. We attempt to reconcile suchV3 with a well-known noncanonical V3 pattern in Kiezdeutsch following the order FrameSetter > SubjectTOPIC > finite verb. We employ the framework proposed by Sam Wolfe inwhich strict-V2 systems have high locus of V2 in Force allowing V2 violations involving resumption and, for some languages, initial Frame Setters but not other violations. We suggest that microvariation in and between Kiezdeutsch and SG results from lexicalization of FrameSetters above ForceP in Kiezdeutsch and below it in SG.
... 6 above on the possibility that dann might be developing into a connector preceding full V2 clauses, structuring lists of events when recounting them. Bunk (2020) acknowledges the fluidity of dann's function, but insists on treating it on a par with central adverbials in V3 orders, regardless of whether it is a discourse marker. Crucially, unlike central adverbials, discourse markers cannot be analysed as having moved from inside the clause, and cannot cause inversion without losing their discourse marker interpretation. ...
... Yet, unlike Hanging Topics (or central adverbials in the incoming V3-option), they do not need to be separated from the associate clause by a prosodic boundary. The temporal adverbial dann 'then' seems to be in the process of developing into a discourse linker (Schalowski 2017), accounting for the fact that its prosodic properties differ significantly from those of other central adverbials in non-inverted V3 (Bunk 2020, Bunk & Rocker 2022. not in SpecFrameP, which is also supported by prosodic integration and binding/reconstruction facts, as sketched in (23 b The partial resumption observed in MLG (16-17) is evidence of the transition to an integration of central adverbials into their associated clause via left dislocation. ...
Circumstantial (‘central’) adverbials canonically occupy the topologial prefield in German, causing inversion of subject and finite verb. V3 order, with such an adverbial preceding a full V2-clause, is normally excluded in German as a consequence of the (relatively) strict verb-second requirement in that language. However, such orders are attested both in historical as well as modern, particularly urban, varieties. Based on new corpus data and an acceptability study, the present paper will address the question of whether this is a case of diachronic continuity, or whether we are dealing with an innovation and a change in progress.
... Findings suggest a systematic verb-third (V3) option that, unlike SVO, preserves the characteristic German sentence brackets. From the point of view of information structure, V3 has the advantage over V2 of allowing both a framesetter or discourse linker [e.g., dann "then, " see (4) and (5) below] and a topic in the left periphery (Wiese, 2012(Wiese, , 2013Walkden, 2017;Wiese et al., 2017;Bunk, 2020). ...
... While V3 in German has mostly been associated with language-contact situations (e.g., Walkden, 2017), we have shown that it is also available in monolingual speakers (Wiese and Rehbein, 2015;Bunk, 2020). The present study confirms this for maj-German across populations: in the RUEG corpus, we find V3 not only in bilingual speakers with h-Greek, h-Russian, and h-Turkish, but also in monolingual speakers, cf. ...
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
... The XP it follows is thus denoted as a contrastive topic in this sentence. inactivity 'In the best case, the rules of the financial constitution promote efficient and innovative political decisions through clever incentive structures In the worst case, however, poorly conceived financial structures foster political inactivity.' (stiftung-marktwirtschaft.de, 2015) In (10), a statistically more marginal, but possible structure is exemplified that occurs in colloquial spoken interactionnot only, as originally observed, in urban varieties of German such as Kiezdeutsch (Wiese, 2012, and much subsequent work), but also in conceptually oral texts of the standard language (Bunk, 2020;Catasso, 2021a;Breitbarth, 2022Breitbarth, , 2023. In this construction, a contrastively interpreted frame-setter (heute 'today') surfaces to the left of a pronominal argument, thereby violating the linear V2 constraint. ...
German is an asymmetric Verb-Second (henceforth: V2) language in which (declarative) main clauses have the conjugated part of the verb form in second position, while in subordinate structures introduced by a complementizer, the finite component of the predicate typically remains in the clause-final head position of the IP: Abstract Present-day German adheres to the Verb-Second (V2) rule, generating the finite verb in V before relinearizing it to C, with only one constituent targeting Spec,CP in main clauses. However, recent studies have identified several mis-matches between structural and linear syntax in the CP domain. While various proposals have addressed these individual patterns, configurations with multiple intrasentential phenomena that violate the V2 constraint have been largely neglected. This paper proposes a model within the cartographic framework to derive complex CP linearizations in German. This approach excludes polyadic-i.e., dyadic or multiple-fronting, integrates cyclic movement (internal Merge) and multiple base-generation (external Merge), and effectively applies the bottleneck effect to account for the observed derivations. The findings reveal that all possible linearizations are complex variants of the basic V2 pattern, offering a nuanced understanding of the CP domain's structural complexities.
... In V3 sentences, the verb non-canonically appears in the third position in declarative clauses, instead of the second, giving rise to an adverbial -subject -finite verb order (e.g., danach wir gehen ins Kino versus danach gehen wir ins Kino 'afterwards we are going to the cinema'). This pattern has been described to appear in both multilingual (Wiese, 2006) and monolingual settings (Wiese, 2013;Schalowski, 2017;Bunk, 2020). However, bilinguals have been found to use V3 more frequently (e.g., Wiese et al., 2022a), picking up language internal tendencies and applying them more productively. ...
... yesterday I was Ku'damm "Yesterday I was on the Ku'damm" (Te Velde, 2017, p. 302) Despite the dynamism of Kiezdeutsch, it remains fundamentally German as its grammatical innovations are firmly rooted in the German grammatical system, expanding upon its existing structures. For example, despite the fact that V2 is the standard word order in German, V3 word order is used not only by multilingual speakers in their German, but also by monolingually raised speakers in Germany (Bunk, 2020), and the omission of prepositions with proper names of locations as in war Ku'damm in (5) above is a feature of the standard language. In Kiezdeutsch, however, such constructions gain frequency and become part of the core grammatical structure. ...
... 113,24,[36][37] This pattern, which has been variously discussed to be characteristic of Kiezdeutsch, a metropolitan ethno-/sociolect of German (Wiese 2012), is not supposed to be part of the syntactic inventory of (Standard) PDG (Hinterhölzl 2017;Walkden 2017;Breitbarth 2022Breitbarth , 2023Sluckin & Bunk 2023). In (colloquial) spoken usage, however, it is frequently attested (cf., e.g., Auer 1996Auer , 1997Bunk 2020; for the same phenomenon in West Flemish, cf. Haegeman & Greco 2018, Greco & Haegeman 2020. ...
In this paper, we present the results of a large-scale corpus study of so-called V3 word orders in the history of German. The umbrella term 'V3' will be used to refer to main clauses in which the finite verb has moved into a left-peripheral head and the preverbal area of the CP is occupied by more than one element, irrespective of the number of items occupying this domain. In particular, the focus will be on the typology of the attested preverbal sequences in V3 clauses and their syntactic analysis. The existing literature on V3 has dealt with such phenomena in very different ways, relying on disparate conceptual premises and methods. By analyzing all diachronic data in a uniform way and within the same theoretical framework (the cartographic model), this paper seeks to alleviate this deficiency. The data are extracted from three digital corpora of Historical German by adopting the same diagnostics for the different language stages. It will be shown that the syntax of German exhibits basic continuity with respect to the possible V3 sequences allowed. The same criteria are then tentatively applied to a pilot sample of Old English clauses extracted from the York Corpus of Old English Prose. Whereas interesting parallelisms can be individuated, some asymmetries with respect to Old High German emerge, which open up new interesting avenues for future research. 1
... Die hohen Korrekturraten der V3-Sätze sind auf den ersten Blick überraschend, sind aber auch mit den Korpusbefunden kompatibel, da diese trotz ihres generell seltenen Auftretens häufiger im informellen als im formellen Kontext auftreten. Das könnte daran liegen, dass die V3-Wortstellung die Vorfeldposition in Hauptsätzen betrifft, die eine zentrale Rolle bei der Organisation von Informationsstruktur und Diskursstruktur spielt (Bunk 2020). Im LangSit-Subkorpus ist zumeist eine diskursiv-pragmatische Funktion von V3-Sätzen mit und dann als einleitendes Adverb nachgewiesen, die jedoch in der Zeitungsstudie aufgrund des schriftlichen formalen Registers eingeschränkt ist, so dass V3-Sätze als ----------markierter wahrgenommen werden könnten. ...
Language contact research is a vibrant discipline that is gaining in importance due to the increasing mobility of speakers and thus of languages. The essays in this volume present recent research on scenarios in which varieties of German confront one or more contact languages in different constellations. Varieties are also included which historically emerged from one or more German variety(ies), but which today are largely detached from the German diasystem. The contact languages or varieties belong predominantly to the Germanic (Frisian, Luxembourgish, English, Afrikaans) and Romance (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) language families.
... V3 structures in V2 contexts are attested in native speakers of German (e.g., Bunk, 2020;Müller, 2013;Schalowski, 2015), multi-ethnolectal Germanic varieties such as Kiezdeutsch (e.g., Freywald et al., 2015;Wiese, Öncü, & Bracker, 2016), as well as heritage Germanic languages (Abraham, 2011;Alexiadou & Lohndal, 2018). Some explanations concern processing strategies. ...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions
This study explores the asymmetric placement of the finite verb in Korean L2 German speakers and examines the effect of sociolinguistic factors on the produced verb placement patterns.
Design/methodology/approach
Fifty-eight participants performed a sentence completion task that elicited the preferred placement of the (finite) verb in matrix and subordinate clauses. In addition, language background interviews were conducted to better understand the sociolinguistic circumstances of the Korean immigrants.
Data and analysis
The experimental data are analyzed using implicational scaling to identify patterns of verb placement. The effect of sociolinguistic factors was tested fitting an ordinal logistic regression model.
Findings/conclusions
Contrary to the developmental stages of L2 German syntax found in previous research, the experimental results revealed that target-like subordinate clauses are produced more robustly than verb second (V2) constructions. It is argued that this result is better explained with difficulties producing subject-verb inversion, V2, than with facilitative L1 transfer effects from Korean, producing German subordinate clauses with V-final order. Concerning social factors, the type of occupation (coal miner or nurse) was most significant in predicting the preferred L2 verb placement pattern, followed by L2 education and age of immigration.
Originality
This article adds to the understanding of L2 German syntax by revisiting previously identified stages of L2 German development with data that target the preferred verb placement in matrix and subordinate clauses from less-researched L1 Korean speakers. The intra-group distinction of Korean immigrants into coal miners and nurses further allows a differentiated look at the role of sociolinguistic factors.
Significance/implications
This research is significant as it aims to draw a comprehensive picture of L2 German acquisition and usage in the context of labor migration, highlighting a less-studied group of immigrants.
In this paper, two syntactic configurations are considered that involve V-to-C movement in present-day German: Verb Second in run-of-the-mill declarative clauses and Verb Second in non-assertive embedded contexts. Along the lines of the cartographic approach and on the basis of syntactic and semantic evidence, it is proposed that in both constructs, the finite verb targets neither Force° nor the head of any other projection hosting a moved constituent in its specifier, but, rather, that it moves into the lowest head in the extended CP layer, namely Fin°. As a result of this, (at least) two types of verb raising to Fin° are to be postulated in this language: one that is triggered by discourse/information structure (V21) and one that results from mechanical movement to C elicited by an otherwise lacking lexicalization of the relevant left-peripheral head (V22).
This study focuses on the linearization of constituents at the right sentence
periphery in German, specifically on non-clausal light-weight constituents
(LWCs) in the post-field. Spoken and written productions of German heritage
speakers (HSs) with English as their majority language (ML) and of monolinguallyraised
speakers (MSs) of German are analyzed in different registers. The right
sentence periphery is an area comprising a lot of variation and it is therefore
intriguing to see how the two speaker groups deal with the options available
if faced with the same communicative tasks. The overall goal is to answer the
question whether the production of post-field LWCs in German HSs and MSs
can provide us with evidence for ongoing internal language change and for the
role of language contact with English. The analyses show a similar variational
spectrum of LWC types and frequencies across speaker groups but a different
distributional variation. The results show effects of register-levelling in the HS
group, as they do not differentiate between the formal and informal setting unlike
the MS group. Therefore, rather than transfer from the ML, the source of differing
distributional variation of LWCs lies in the diverging adherence to register norms
due to different exposure conditions across speaker groups.
In this article, it is proposed that different types of apparent “non-V2” arrangements in Present-Day German matrix clauses which are generally treated independently are similar in nature and derivable by means of a limited number of syntactic operations that do not challenge or put into question the classical account of German as a structural V2 language. The analysis reveals that an adequate formalization of all possible left-peripheral word orders must rest upon three basic assumptions: (i) V2 in Modern German main clauses can be neither movement to the head position whose specifier hosts a moved or base-generated XP nor (necessarily) movement to Force°, but can be generalized to raising of the Vfin to Fin°; (ii) German has a Split CP which is fundamentally similar, mutatis mutandis, to that of Romance languages; (iii) this language is subject to the bottleneck effect, which states that all movement into the CP passes through [Spec,FinP]. The theoretical approach pursued here attempts to account for left dislocation and other (frame-setting and non-frame-setting) topicalization phenomena by assuming that in German (differently from other Split-CP languages), XPs base-generated in the middle field move to their surface position by cyclical movement within the left periphery. This allows us to avoid ad hoc explanations, as well as violations of the bottleneck effect.
The paper proposes structural constraints for different adjunct classes in German and English. Approaches in which syntax has only the task to provide adjunct positions and in which principles of scope are supposed to explain the distribution of adjuncts are rejected as incomplete. The syntactic requirements are not as rigid as other approaches require, such that there is just one possible position for a given adjunct. Rather the syntactic constraints may be fulfilled in different positions.
The paper argues that the German prefield can be filled in three different ways: (i) by "Formal Movement", which takes the highest constituent of the middle field, preserving whatever pragmatic property the constituent has "acquired" in the middle field, (ii) by base-generation of certain adverbials that are not licensed clause internally, (iii) by Ā-movement, which goes together with a contrastive interpretation of the moved item. In view of option (iii), German can be seen to provide support for the claim that contrast has to be considered as an autonomous concept of information structure. © 2006 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
Die folgenden Überlegungen sind im Zusammenhang der Studien zu nonagentiven Konstruktionen des Deutschen zu sehen. Im Beitrag wird das Verb gehören in Konstruktionen des Typs gehören mit erweitertem Infinitiv mit zu im Mittelpunkt stehen, die in historischen Korpora nachzuweisen sind und einen Beitrag zum Werden des sogenannten 'gehören-Passivs' im Gegenwartsdeutschen geleistet haben dürften.
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The following contribution will extend the usage-based studies on non-agentive constructions ob German. The verb gehören in constructions like diese gehören kalt zu geben will be focused on in this paper and the development of the so called 'gehören-Passiv' will be traced.
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch , a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language ‘High German’, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of ‘German’ speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane. (Standard language ideology, Kiezdeutsch, dialect, public discourse, Othering, racism by proxy)*
Open Access: doi:10.1017/S0047404515000226
Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb inversion may be absent under certain well-defined conditions. In this article I outline those conditions and the type of syntactic analysis required to account for them, claiming that an articulated left periphery is needed to account for the findings. The similarity of the V3 patterns found in these new varieties, which are geographically isolated from each other but which share a characterization in terms of the demographics of their speaker groups, invites a diachronic account in terms of language contact. I argue that transfer cannot account for V3, but that a scenario of sequential simplification and complexification is able to do so. Finally, turning to Old English, which exhibits similar (though not identical) V2/V3 alternations, I argue that a similar synchronic analysis can be upheld and that its diachronic origins may well also have been similar—a case of using the present to inform our approach to the past.
The view that Old Spanish was a form of verb second (V2) language has been prominently critiqued. Using data from a 14th century Spanish prose text it is argued that (later) Old Spanish in fact provides compelling evidence for a V2 analysis, which assumes head movement of the finite verb into the left periphery of the clause accompanied by merger of a phrasal constituent in the C-layer. V3 matrix clauses involving co-occurrence of a Topic and Focus are not attested in the text and V4 is also not found. On this basis it is argued that Old Spanish is a class of V2 language where the locus of the V2 property is CForce, a high head in the clausal left periphery. Despite the widely held view that Old Spanish was a symmetrical V2 language, evidence from complement clauses is presented that this is not the case. All cases of embedded V2 are found under a class of predicates known to license so-called 'Main Clause Phenomena' cross-linguistically. Later Old Spanish thus patterns with Mainland Scandinavian in allowing a restricted class of embedded V2 clauses, therefore precluding a symmetrical V2 analysis.
L'A. propose une analyse contrastive destinee a determiner comment la presentation de l'information est realisee structuralement dans diverses langues. Il montre que l'anglais et beaucoup d'autres langues germaniques exploitent principalement l'intonation a des fins informationnelles, alors que d'autres langues, comme le catalan, privilegient plutot la syntaxe, et que dans d'autres groupes de langues encore, le correlat structural premier est morphologique. L'A. tente ainsi d'identifier un ensemble de primitifs lies a la presentation de l'information et appliques a des faits translinguistiques et examine la maniere dont ils interagissent avec d'autres facteurs structuraux, pragmatiques et semantiques
This paper argues that the common denominator of topic-comment (TC) constructions in natural languages is not a single functional feature (e.g. aboutness) but rather the fact that they share some salient semantic attributes with prototypical examples of TC. The paper tries to disentangle these prototypical semantic attributes of TC and then shows, mainly referring to examples from German, that different TC constructions are characterized by different combinations of these attributes and therefore cannot be analyzed properly by unitary theories of TC function.
Modern grammatical research, 1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, in-cludes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surpris-ingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantia-tions of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth highly abstract hypotheses making use of a complex system of repre-sentations, operations, and constraints that are offered as a theory of the rich biological capacity that humans have for language. 2 This community eschews writing explicit grammars of individual languages in favor of offering conjec-tures about the 'parameters of variation' that modulate the general grammat-ical scheme. These proposals are motivated by small data sets from a variety of languages. A second community, which we will refer to as the Typological (TYP) camp, is concerned with descriptive observations of individual languages, with particular concern for idiosyncrasies and complexities. Many TYP re-searchers eschew formal models (or leave their development to others), while others in this community refer to the theory they embrace as 'Construction Grammar' (CxG).
This volume provides a mechanism to uncover the extremely rich split-CP of V2 languages, in both root and embedded clauses, on the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. The movement of the inflected verbal head is triggered to agree with the profiled informational value of the fronted XP. The V2 “constraint” shall thus be observed as a sum of micro-V2s, in which the inflected head creates Spec-Head configurations with the activated criterial positions in the relevant context. The “second linear” position of the verb results from the movement of the inflected verb to the highest activated criterial head. In other words, there is no “bottleneck effect”, but ordinary violations in terms of locality between fronted XPs. This monograph is aimed principally at postgraduate students and researchers interested in the description of natural languages adopting the guidelines of the Cartography of Syntactic Structures.
This classic research monograph develops and illustrates the theory of linguistic structure known as Cognitive Grammar, and applies it to representative phenomena in English and other languages. Cognitive grammar views language as an integral facet of cognition and claims that grammatical structure cannot be understood or revealingly described independently of semantic considerations.
This book is the study of two different kinds of variation across the Germanic languages. One involves the position of the finite verb, and the other the possible positions of the "logical" subject in constructions with expletive (or "dummy") subjects. The book applies the theory of principles and parameters to the study of comparative syntax. Several languages are considered, including less frequently discussed ones like Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Yiddish.
This volume emphasizes the energetic nature of linguistic diversity and its consequences of how we think about language, how it affects the individual, education in school, and urban spaces across the globe. Hence, linguistic diversity reflects the constant state of rapid change prevalent in modern societies bearing opportunities as well as challenges. It is the prime objective of this selection of contributions to give a differentiated picture of the chances of linguistic diversity. Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity pays tribute to more recent developments in the study of language, applied linguistics, and education sciences. Contributions in this volume discuss how the concept of language is contextualized in a world of polylanguaging, investigate latent factors of influence, multilingual individuals, multilingual proficiency, multilingual practices and development, multilingual communication as well as teaching practices and whether they foster or hamper multilingual development.
This investigation of verb-third (V3) constructions in Kiezdeutsch, consisting of a temporal adverb (TA) and a subject left of the finite verb, aims to shed light on the syntax and prosody of the West Germanic left periphery. I show that two pieces of evidence from V3-structures support the hypothesis that this left periphery has two syntactic properties: i) a TP that is the final projection when a temporal adverb is merged late and does not induce verb raising out of TP, creating the V3-structure, and ii) deaccentuation: the lack of pitch accent on any of the pre-finite verb elements. This analysis requires two terminal finite verb positions in the left periphery. If we include Kiezdeutsch in the family of West Germanic languages – for which there is ample independent evidence – we must conclude, as supported also by the presence of other V3-structures elsewhere in this family, as well as by the prosody requirements of these V3-structures, that all members of this family have the same options in the left periphery as Kiezdeutsch. The only difference between Kiezdeutsch and the others – which also allow V3-structures but always with at least one pitch accent – is the V3-structure with temporal adverbs in Kiezdeutsch in which two constituents are allowed left of the finite verb, but no pitch accent. In this way a single prosodic phrase can be created consisting of the TA, pronominal subject and the finite verb.
This volume interfaces three fields of linguistics rarely discussed in the same context. Its underlying theme is linguistic variation, and the ways in which historical linguists and dialectologists may learn from insights offered by typology, and vice versa . The aim of the contributions is to raise the awareness of these linguistic subdisciplines of each other and to encourage their cross-fertilization to their mutual benefit.
If linguistic typology is to unify the study of all types of linguistic variation, this variation, both diatopic and diachronic, will enrich typological research itself. With the aim of capturing the relevant dimensions of variation, the studies in this volume make use of new methodologies, including electronic corpora and databases, which enable cross- and intralinguistic comparisons dialectally and across time. Based on original research and unified by an innovative theme, the volume will be of interest to both students and teachers of linguistics and Germanic languages.
This chapter extends the parsing model outlined in Gorrell (1996). In that article the focus was on German verb-second declarative clauses. Here I will discuss the ’subject-before-object’ [SBO] preference which is evident in a number of different types of structurally-ambiguous German clauses. I will argue for an approach which unifies both the processing of verb-second and verb-final clauses, and the processing of declarative and wh-clauses. I will argue that, in the processing of verb-final clauses, the parser makes crucial use of item-independent regularities concerning clause structure, argument structure, and case assignment. Further, I will argue that the subject preference observed in ambiguous wh-constructions follows from the general, grammar-based, principle of minimal structure building which is also responsible for the SBO preference in declarative clauses. The syntactic analysis which underlies this approach treats wh-subjects as occurring in the same base-generated position as non-wh-subjects.
Cette etude examine les differences individuelles dans la maniere dont les lecteurs integrent des mots successifs dans leur representation d'un texte. Elle met l'accent sur le role du travail mnemonique et sur son interaction avec les caracteristiques du texte a lire, etudiee par l'introduction de contradictions dans les elements du texte
This article develops a view of -wa and -ga based on modern theories of information structure. The characterizations of the interpretations of ga and wa are both disjunctive. They have appealed to the notions of "exhaustive listing" and of "topic." There are considerable and well-known problems with the analysis of ga as a focus marker. There is a fairly general consensus that ga should not be singled out as carrying any semantic or pragmatic information; its alternation with wa is only privileged with respect to the alternation between, say, o (the accusative marker) and wa in the sense that it appears that subjects are an unmarked choice of topic. A formal treatment of the relation between contrastive and noncontrastive wa is badly needed, both for a satisfactory description of Japanese and more generally for the light that it might shed on the concept of topic writ large.
The basic empirical goal of this chapter is to examine the nature and structure of the C-system in Welsh and in at least some of the other Celtic languages. (I leave aside Scots Gaelic and Modem Irish; for some remarks on the latter, see McCloskey 2000). The theoretical issue behind the discussion is to consider whether we can maintain that the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) holds at the CP-level in these languages, and, if so, in what form. Doing this entails a discussion of Germanic verb second (V2), since it has been proposed that the obligatory XP-movement into the C-system that makes up part of this phenomenon is a consequence of the EPP (cf. Chomsky 2000, 2001; Haegeman 1996; Laenzlinger 1998; Roberts 1993; and Roberts and Roussou 2002).
This chapter examines the grammaticalization process of two CP elements in Old Italian: the particles sì and e. The chapter contributes to shedding light on the complex phenomenon of V2 on the one hand and on the left periphery of the clause on the other, insofar as Old Italian represents the ideal case study investigate how the V2 property interacts with a fully articulated left periphery. © Editorial matter and organization Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Llusa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, and Francesc Roca 2005. All rights reserved.
Alternatives are discussed for a number of assumptions fundamental to established linguistic theories. These alternatives lead to a coherent view of linguistic structure that treats grammar as a symbolic phenomenon, and emphasizes the importance of analysability to grammatical structure. A descriptive framework called SPACE GRAMMAR is outlined, in particular its approach to semantic structure and grammatical valence relations. The concepts are applied first to nominal structure and then to the English passive construction. It is claimed that be, by, and the participial morpheme are all meaningful, and that passives are not derived from an active clausal source.
This book investigates the nature of generalizations in language, drawing parallels between our linguistic knowledge and more general conceptual knowledge. The book combines theoretical, corpus, and experimental methodology to provide a constructionist account of how linguistic generalizations are learned, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained. Part I argues that broad generalizations involve the surface forms in language, and that much of our knowledge of language consists of a delicate balance of specific items and generalizations over those items. Part II addresses issues surrounding how and why generalizations are learned and how they are constrained. Part III demonstrates how independently needed pragmatic and cognitive processes can account for language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations, without appeal to stipulations that are specific to language.
