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The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).
Wie die meisten westgermanischen Varietäten kennen auch die niederdeutschen Dialekte eine Konstruktion, in der das Verb 'tun' (niederdeutsch meist 'doon') als Hilfsverb fungiert und einen Infinitiv regiert - die sog. 'tun'-Periphrase ('Lesen tut sie gerne', 'Sie tut gerne lesen'). Allerdings weicht die niederdeutsche 'tun'-Periphrase sehr deutlich von den aus anderen Sprachen bekannten Mustern ab: Viele niederdeutsche Dialekte zeigen eine auffällige und erklärungsbedürftige Tendenz, die Periphrase auf Nebensätze mit Verbletztstellung zu beschränken ('dass sie lesen tut'). Zudem unterscheiden sich niederdeutsche Dialekte z.T. erheblich darin, wie weit die Periphrase obligatorisiert ist bzw. welche Faktoren bei der Variation zwischen der Periphrase und der einfachen Form ('dass sie liest') ausschlaggebend sind.
In dieser Monographie werden diese und andere grammatische Eigenschaften der Konstruktion auf der Grundlage von umfangreichen Korpusrecherchen und eigenen Erhebungen herausgearbeitet. Die Befunde werden mit dem Instrumentarium der Grammatiktheorie erklärt und in einen typologischen und diachronen Zusammenhang gestellt.
Just like most varieties of West Germanic, virtually all varieties of German use a construction in which a cognate of the English verb 'do' (standard German 'tun') functions as an auxiliary and selects another verb in the bare infinitive, a construction known as 'do'-periphrasis or 'do'-support. The present paper provides an Optimality Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon. It builds on a previous analysis by Bader and Schmid (An OT-analysis of 'do'-support in Modern German, 2006) but (i) extends it from root clauses to subordinate clauses and (ii) aims to capture all of the major distributional patterns found across (mostly non-standard) varieties of German. In so doing, the data are used as a testing ground for different models of German clause structure. At first sight, the occurrence of 'do' in subordinate clauses, as found in many varieties, appears to support the standard CP-IP-VP analysis of German. In actual fact, however, the full range of data turn out to challenge, rather than support, this model. Instead, I propose an analysis within the IP-less model by Haider (Deutsche Syntax - generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer projektiven Grammatik, Narr, Tübingen, 1993 et seq.). In sum, the 'do'-support data will be shown to have implications not only for the analysis of clause structure but also for the OT constraints commonly assumed to govern the distribution of 'do', for the theory of non-projecting words (Toivonen in Non-projecting words, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2003) as well as research on grammaticalization.