430 Germanische Sprachen; Deutsch
Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (3)
Document Type
- Article (2)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Copy deletion (1)
- Freezing (1)
- Head movement (1)
- V-to-C movement (1)
- V-to-T (1)
- VP-topicalization (1)
- Verb doubling (1)
- Verb second (1)
- movement (1)
Institute
- Department Linguistik (3) (remove)
In the absence of a stranded auxiliary or modal, VP-topicalization in most Germanic languages gives rise to the presence of a dummy verb meaning 'do'. Cross-linguistically, this is a rather uncommon strategy as comparable VP-fronting constructions in other languages, e.g. Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese, among many others, exhibit verb doubling. A comparison of several recent approaches to verb doubling in VP-fronting reveals that it is the consequence of VP-evacuating head movement of the verb to some higher functional head, which saves the (low copy of the) verb from undergoing copy deletion as part of the low VP copy in the VP-topicalization dependency. Given that almost all Germanic languages have such V-salvaging head movement, namely V-to-C movement, but do not show verb doubling, this paper suggests that V-raising is exceptionally impossible in VP-topicalization clauses and addresses the question of why it is blocked. After discussing and rejecting some conceivable explanations for the lack of verb doubling, I propose that the blocking effect arises from a bleeding interaction between V-to-C movement and VP-to-SpecCP movement. As both operations are triggered by the same head, i.e. C, the VP is always encountered first by a downward search algorithm. Movement of VP then freezes it and its lower copies for subextraction precluding subsequent V-raising. Crucially, this implies that there is no V-to-T raising in most Germanic languages. V2 languages with V-to-T raising, e.g. Yiddish, are correctly predicted to not exhibit the blocking effect.
In present-day German we find new word order options, particularly well-known from Turkish-German bilingual speakers in the contexts of new urban dialects, which allow violations of the canonical verb-second position in independent declarative clauses. In these cases, two positions are occupied in the forefield in front of the finite verb, usually by an adverbial and a subject, which identify, at the level of information structure, frame-setter and topic, respectively. Our study investigates the influence of verbal versus language -independent information-structural preferences for this linearisation, comparing Turkish-German multilingual speakers who have grown up in Germany with monolingual German and Turkish speakers. For tasks, in which grammatical restrictions were largely minimised, the results indicate a general tendency to place verbs in a position after the frame-setter and the topic; in addition, we found language-specific influences that distinguish Turkish-German and monolingual German speakers from monolingual Turkish ones. We interpret this as evidence for an information-structural motivation for verb-third, and for a clear dominance of German for Turkish-German speakers in Germany.
This study presents new insights into null subjects, topic drop and the interpretation of topic-dropped elements. Besides providing an empirical data survey, it offers explanations to well-known problems, e.g. syncretisms in the context of null-subject licensing or the marginality of dropping an element which carries oblique case. The book constitutes a valuable source for both empirically and theoretically interested (generative) linguists.