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Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study.
We report two corpus analyses to examine the impact of animacy, definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression on the ordering of double objects in the spontaneous speech of German-speaking two- to four-year-old children and the child-directed speech of their mothers. The first corpus analysis revealed that definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression influenced word order variation in child language and child-directed speech when the type of referring expression distinguished between pronouns and lexical noun phrases. These results correspond to previous child language studies in English (e.g., de Marneffe et al. 2012). Extending the scope of previous studies, our second corpus analysis examined the role of different pronoun types on word order. It revealed that word order in child language and child-directed speech was predictable from the types of pronouns used. Different types of pronouns were associated with different sentence positions but also showed a strong correlation to givenness and definiteness. Yet, the distinction between pronoun types diminished the effects of givenness so that givenness had an independent impact on word order only in child-directed speech but not in child language. Our results support a multi-factorial approach to word order in German. Moreover, they underline the strong impact of the type of referring expression on word order and suggest that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of the factors influencing word order variation.
The present work deals with the variation in the linearisation of German infinitival complements from a diachronic perspective. Based on the observation that in present-day German the position of infinitival complements is restricted by properties of the matrix verb (Haider, 2010, Wurmbrand, 2001), whereas this appears much more liberal in older stages of German (Demske, 2008, Maché and Abraham, 2011, Demske, 2015), this dissertation investigates the emergence of those restrictions and the factors that have led to a reduced, yet still existing variability. The study contrasts infinitival complements of two types of matrix verbs, namely raising and control verbs. In present-day German, these show different syntactic behaviour and opposite preferences as far as the position of the infinitive is concerned: while infinitival complements of raising verbs build a single clausal domain with the with the matrix verb and occur obligatorily intraposed, infinitive complements of control verbs can form clausal constituents and occur predominantly extraposed. This correlation is not attested in older stages of German, at least not until Early New High German.
Drawing on diachronic corpus data, the present work provides a description of the changes in the linearisation of infinitival complements from Early New High German to present-day German which aims at finding out when the correlation between infinitive type and word order emerged and further examines their possible causes. The study shows that word order change in German infinitival complements is not a case of syntactic change in the narrow sense, but that the diachronic variation results from the interaction of different language-internal and language-external factors and that it reflects, on the one hand, the influence of language modality on the emerging standard language and, on the other hand, a process of specialisation.
V3-Deklarativa – wie z.B. ‚Auf einmal der Hund hat sich mies erschrocken‘ – kommen sowohl bei bilingualen als auch bei monolingualen L1-Sprecher:innen des Deutschen vor. Im Rahmen einer korpuslinguistischen Analyse anhand des RUEG-Korpus (Wiese et al. 2021) untersucht diese Masterarbeit die folgende Fragestellung: In welchen Kontexten verwenden mono- und bilinguale Sprecher:innen des Deutschen genuines V3? Dabei bezieht sich der Begriff ‚Kontext‘ sowohl auf das Setting, in dem die V3-Deklarativa produziert werden (mediale und konzeptionelle Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit), als auch den linguistischen Kontext (syntaktische, semantische, informationsstrukturelle und phonologische Eigenschaften der präverbalen Konstituenten). Die Korpusuntersuchung ergibt, dass V3-Belege in allen Settings und in allen Sprecher:innengruppen auftreten. Die bilingualen Sprecher:innen verwenden insgesamt häufiger V3 als die monolingualen, wobei jedoch große Frequenzunterschiede je nach Heritage-Sprache vorliegen. Hinsichtlich der präverbalen Konstituenten bestätigt sich die bereits in der vorherigen Forschung identifizierte Tendenz zur syntaktischen Abfolge Adverbial-Subjekt und zur semantischen Abfolge Zeit-Person. Neben Temporaladverbialen erscheinen insbesondere Satzadverbiale als initiale Konstituente. Auf Ebene der Informationsstruktur kann den initialen Adverbialen zu fast 94% die Funktion eines Diskurslinkers oder Framesetters zugeschrieben werden, was die These einer informationsstrukturellen Motivation der V3-Stellung bekräftigt. Eine zweite Korpusanalyse anhand des Korpus Falko der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin zeigt, dass sich auch bei V3-Deklarativa fortgeschrittener DaF-Lernender eine informationsstrukturelle Motivation der Syntax geltend machen lässt. Insgesamt plädiert die Masterarbeit somit für einen ressourcenorientierten Blick auf V3-Strukturen.