Grammatik
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The present article proposes a syntactic and semantic analysis of assertive clauses that comprises their truth-conditional aspects and their speech act potential in communication. What is commonly called “illocutionary force” is differentiated into three structurally and functionally distinct layers: a judgement phrase, representing subjective epistemic and evidential attitudes; a commitment phrase, representing the social commitment related to assertions; and an act phrase, representing the relation to the common ground of the conversation. The article provides several pieces of evidence for this structure: from the interpretation and syntactic position of various classes of epistemic, evidential, affirmative and speech act-related operators, from clausal complements embedded by different types of predicates, from embedded root clauses, and from anaphora referring to different clausal projections. The syntactic assumptions are phrased within X-bar theory, and the semantic interpretation makes use of dynamic update of common ground, differentiating between informative and performative updates. The object language is German, with particular reference to verb final and verb second structure.
The paper is concerned with the filling of the right edge of a German clause with different constituents: subconstituents of the clause, arguments and modifiers of the NP, appositions and right-dislocated elements. It is argued that these different ways of filling the right edge come about in quite different ways. Subconstituents of the clause are base generated at the right edge in syntax. Constituents of the NP and appositions get to the right edge postsyntactically, i.e., they are linearised there only in the phonological component. Finally, the appearance of right-dislocated constituents is the result of two well-established deletion processes operating on two adjacent clauses.
The different mechanisms allow us to understand differences these elements show regarding positioning inside the right edge, binding and intonation. An important empirical generalisation put forward in the IDS-grammar can be captured. The grammar's controversial assumption that the right edge comprises a part which is disintegrated in between two syntactically integrated parts can be shown to be superfluous.
In current corpuslinguistic investigations, especially the collection of linguistic data and the frequency of linguistic phenomena (i.e. in the "linguistic matter") is in the center of interest of morphological discussions. This paper argues in favor of taking also morphological "antimatter" in account, i.e. surveying the structure of words containing morphological restrictions which cannot be proven systematically. With recourse to Popper's falsificationism and starting with prominent restrictions in the morphology of German, the article discusses theoretical consequences and chances for morphological theory with special emphasis on morphological change, i.e. when antimatter becomes matter and vice versa.
Constructionist approaches to grammar do not draw a clear distinction between lexicon and grammar, as generative "words and rules" accounts do. Rather, they conceptualize grammar and lexicon as a continuum of constructions of greater or lesser complexity and abstraction. In this paper, i explore the implications of this paradigm shift for the applied discipline of grammaticography. If we abandon the distinction between grammar and lexicon, should we also abandon the distinction between grammar, books and dictionaries? Drawing on a case study on the treatment of verbless constructions in the "IDS-Grammatik", it is argued that constructions should play a greater role in grammar books, but that grammar books still need to provide access to general principles of grammar.