Vortrag: Free Word Order of Focus and Topic in German

German shows a relatively free word order, e.g. "dass der Fritz der Maria das BUCH gegeben hat / dass der Fritz das Buch der MARIA gegeben hat." (Lenerz 1977). The question how a model of grammar can allow such permutations and at the same time motivate each derivation remains still unanswered even in current research. From a prosodic-pragmatic perspective, it has been argued that focus cannot preceed topic in German (Wagner 2008, Matsumoto 2023). In this talk I present data where both the subject and object focus are able to proceed the topic of the sentence. I will give an account for the data by aligning the syntactic structure with its prosodic constraints under Richards' (2016) "Contiguity Theory" interface approach.

Matsumoto (2023) tries to account for ordering possibilities of subjects and objects and their roles as contrastive topic and contrastive focus by aligning a language’s prosodically active edges with the syntactic structure through Contiguity Theory (Richards 2016). Matsumoto (2023: 15) claims the contrastive focus - contrastive topic order is disallowed in German as a head- and verb-final language (cf. Wagner 2008). In this talk I present data of topic/focus subject and topic/focus object order in German ellipsis. I argue that while some orders may be more marked than others, they are not rendered ungrammatical and should be generated under any grammarical model. Testing Matsumoto's "Contiguity-Compliant Chain Reduction" theory, I showcase its limits and propose readjustements in order to account for the data.

References:
- Lenerz, Jürgen (1977): Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. Narr, Tübingen.
- Matsumoto, Daiki (2023). “Contiguity Theory and the Ordering of Contrastive Elements”. In: Linguistic Inquiry, pp. 1–28.
- Richards, Norvin (2016). Contiguity theory. Vol. 73. MIT Press.
- Wagner, Michael (2008). “A compositional analysis of contrastive topics”. In: Proceedings of NELS. Vol. 38. 2007, pp. 415–428.

Info

Tag: 22.11.2024
Anfangszeit: 15:35
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: 00A03 CNMS
Track: Theoretische Linguistik
Sprache: en

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