400 Sprache, Linguistik
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Displacement is a fundamental property of human language, and the restrictions on displacement have been a central concern in generative grammar ever since Ross' (1967) ground-breaking observations of island constraints. While island phenomena have been investigated in detail from various perspectives, a different domain, the domain of Freezing, originally defined in terms of non-base structures, has received far less attention. This volume brings together papers that address the questions of: What are the different concepts of Freezing? Which empirical domains can they explain? Is Freezing a core-syntactic restriction or does information structure, or processing play a role? The collection of papers provides insights into the empirical basis of the Freezing Principle in relation to other restrictions on extraction in order to contribute to a broader understanding of the nature of restrictions on displacement in language. The overall goal of the volume is a reconsideration of Freezing and other (sub-)extraction phenomena, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective, by bringing together contributions from experts in the field to discuss and broaden our knowledge of the empirical range of Freezing phenomena as well as their explanation.
Our corpus study is concerned with subject-verb agreement in contemporary German, more precisely the variation in verb number. We focus on subjects consisting of noun phrases coordinated by the conjunction und (‘and’). In our samples, both nouns are in singular. Number resolution – i.e., plural verb despite of the singular nouns – can be regarded as the default choice in contemporary German. However, our data show that eliding the second determiner in the subject enhances the probability of using the singular verb. This ellipsis effect is highly significant in German and Austrian texts. It seems to be weaker in Swiss texts. Regression analyses reveal that the ellipsis effect is stronger than both the highly significant influence of subject individuation and the significant effect of subject agentivity.