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Current theories of the syntax-semantics interface associate aspects of meaning that cannot be traced to visible structure with empty projecting heads or constructions as wholes. We present an alternative compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal or comparative meaning of inchoative, middle, excessive and directional complement constructions. Accord-ingly, the hidden meaning results from a repair mechanism that passes on a locally problematic meaning component to the next higher derivational cycle. The meaning component in question is one half of the logical form of Difference as contributed by certain functional elements or by syntactically transitive (nominative-accusative) configurations.
The present investigation targets the phenomenon commonly called control. Many languages including German and Polish employ non-finite clauses (besides finite clauses) as propositional complements. The subject of these complement clauses is left unexpressed and must generally be interpreted co-referentially with the subject or object of the matrix clause (subject or object control). However. there are also infinitive-selecting verbs that do not allow for a co- referential interpretation of the embedded subject - semantically, the embedded infinitives of these anti-control verbs are thus less dependent on or less unifiable with the matrix proposition. In Polish anti-control constructions, non-finite complements are overtly marked with the complementizer zeby, suggesting that they are structurally more complex (namely. containing a C-projection) than the non-finite complements in control constructions lacking zeby (modulo special contexts. viz. 'control switch'). In a comparative perspective, the paper brings corpuslinguistic and experimental evidence to bear on the question whether surface appearances notwithstanding, the infinitival complements of anti-control verbs in German should similarly be analyzed as truly sentential, i.e., C-headed structures.
This paper explores speakers’ notions of the situational appropriacy of linguistic variants. We conducted a web-based survey in which we collected ratings of the appropriacy of variants of linguistic variables in spoken German. A range of quantitative methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and various forms of visualization techniques) is applied in order to analyze metalinguistic awareness and the differences in the evaluation of written vs. spoken stimuli. First, our data show that speakers’ ratings of the appropriacy of linguistic variants vary reliably with two rough clusters representing formal and informal speech situations and genres. The findings confirm that speakers adhere to a notion of spoken standard German which takes genre and register-related variation into account. Secondly, our analysis reveals a written language bias: metalinguistic awareness is strongly influenced by the physical mode of the presentation of linguistic items (spoken vs. written).