Grammatik
Refine
Year of publication
- 2014 (4) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (3)
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- German (4)
Has Fulltext
- yes (4)
Keywords
- Syntax (4) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (3)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (1)
Publisher
- Nodus (2)
- Stauffenburg (1)
Previous accounts addressing the question what semantic properties of a matrix predicate determine the possible clause type of the embedded clause have not provided a general answer (e.g. Grimshaw 1979, Zifonun et al. 1997, Ginzburg & Sag 2000). This paper proposes that clause-embedding predicates fulfill characteristic logical conditions, so-called consistency conditions, which rule the syntactic potential of the matrix clause: for instance, the clause type of the embedded clause (declarative, ob- and/or wh-interrogative) and the correlate type, the matrix predicate can co-occur with (es and/or ProPP). Furthermore, they predict the logical forms of legitimate constructions with embedded ob- or wh-interrogatives, respectively, and how a legitimate optional correlate modifies the meaning of the matrix predicate.
Previous accounts addressing the question what semantic properties of a matrix predicate determine the possible clause type of the embedded clause have not provided a general answer (e.g. Grimshaw 1979, Zifonun et al. 1997, Ginzburg & Sag 2000). This paper proposes that clause-embedding predicates fulfill characteristic logical conditions, so-called consistency conditions, which rule the syntactic potential of the matrix clause: for instance, the clause type of the embedded clause (declarative, ob- and/or wh-interrogative) and the correlate type, the matrix predicate can co-occur with (es and/or ProPP). Furthermore, they predict the logical forms of legitimate constructions with embedded ob- or wh-interrogatives, respectively, and how a legitimate optional correlate modifies the meaning of the matrix predicate.
This paper investigates the syntactic behaviour of adverbial clauses in contemporary German and Italian. It focuses on three main questions: (i) How many degrees of syntactic integration of adverbial clauses are there to be distinguished by an adequate grammatical description of the two languages? (ii) Which linear and hierarchical positions in the structure of the matrix sentence can be occupied by adverbial clauses? (iii) Which is the empirical distribution of adverbial clauses introduced by the conjunctions als, während, wenn, obwohl and weil in German, as well as quando, mentre, se, sebbene and perché in Italian?
Responding to question (i), a distinction is drawn between strongly integrated, weakly integrated and syntactically disintegrated adverbial clauses. There are further degrees on the gradient of syntactic integration, which are not examined in this paper. Responding to question (ii), eight classes of structural positions in the matrix sentence are identified that can be occupied by adverbial clauses. Five of them are positions of syntactic integration, three are positions of disintegration. Responding to question (iii), the distribution of the ten classes of adverbial clauses is described on the basis of a corpus of internet data. Strongly integrated, weakly integrated and disintegrated adverbial clauses show clearly different distributions within the structure of the matrix sentence. Also the semantic classes of adverbial clauses (temporal, adversative, conditional, concessive, causal) are distributed differently.