Silent Heads in Early New High German
- The rising standard language in Early New High German (1350–1650) provides particularly interesting cases for the question of missing heads on all levels of language structure. A well-known example are subordinate clauses lacking a finite auxiliary verb, traditionally called Afinite Constructions. Based on new data, drawn from two treebanks of Early New High German, the present paper will briefly sketch the distribution of ACs, before establishing that they are in fact a type of ellipsis and do not cluster with other non-finite clauses in German. The remainder of the paper addresses the question what kind of information is missing in ACs and how this information is retrieved. Obviously, auxiliary drop in ENHG represents a type of ellipsis rarely attested in present-day German.
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