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In the present-day Germanic languages, free relatives (FRs) share formal properties with indirect question in that both constructions are introduced by w-pronouns. However, at least in German (and historical stages of a larger set of languages, including English), there is an additional pattern which involves the use of d-pronouns such as German der/die/das ‘that.masc./fem./neut.’, which typically introduce headed relative clauses. Focusing on presentday German, this paper shows that d-FRs are set apart from w-FRs by a number of properties including syntactic distribution in the matrix clause, behavior with respect to matching effects, inventory of pronominal forms, and semantic interpretation. From these observations, it is concluded that d-FRs should not be analyzed on a par with w-FRs. More precisely, we argue that d-FRs are in fact regular headed (restrictive) relative clauses where the relative pronoun has been deleted under identity with a demonstrative antecedent. This apparent instance of syntactic haplology is then analyzed as resulting from the same mechanism that eliminates copies/traces in movement dependencies.
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.