Very special thanks for linguistic company and friendship over the years to Markus Steinbach and Ralf Vogel. I'm greatly indebted to the Max-Planck Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, which supported my work for over three years with utmost generosity. Also to the Department of Linguistics at Stanford for hosting me during the last stages of finishing this book. Part of these materials have been presented at the GGS-Meeting in Salzburg 1998, and WCCFL 18 in Tucson 1999. Thanks to the audiences for comments and suggestions. I dedicate this book to my parents. (1) BT(α,β) α β → (α, β) A singulary transformation, called "Move" in minimalist theory, applies to a single complex structure α, locates a substructure β inside α, lifts β out of α, combines it with α into a larger whole, and leaves a recording "trace" or "copy" of β in the original position of β. This is sketched in (2). (5) a.
German disallows embedded infinitival (wh-)interrogatives. Although crosslinguistic comparison has not been undertaken to any broader extent, most accounts attribute this gap to properties of complementizers and the C-system. By contrast, this gap will here be linked to a correlation between non-finite (wh-)interrogatives and the indefinite-interrogative affinity present in the inventory of wh-pronouns of many languages. The claim will be defended that, if a language has embedded non-finite (wh-)interrogatives, then its pronominal system does not have a robust indefinite/interrogative ambiguity. In addition to a crosslinguistic survey, it will be sketched -with particular reference to German -how to relate these two domains in terms of clausal typing and the illocutionary force of non-finite (root) interrogatives.
Syntactic analyses of Austronesian languages have predominantly been concerned with three phenomena. First, and perhaps most widely known, there is the controversy about how to view Philippine-type voice systems. These are typically symmetrical in the sense that what resembles passivization does not lead to demotion, i.e. oblique status of one of the arguments involved. This symmetry is closely related to the difficulty of determining the grammatical function of "subject." Thus, although voice morphology correlates with (the semantic role of) a single designated argument , which we will call "trigger" (argument) henceforth, standard subject properties are distributed between this trigger and an actor argument when the two do not coincide. Secondly, Austronesian languages tend to have head initial word order, which often results in verb initial or predicate initial clause structure. Thirdly, there exists a condition on unbounded dependencies for arguments, disallowing extraction of anything other than the trigger. While questions surrounding these issues are clearly far from settled, the volume we are presenting and discussing here is intended to shift perspectives and reflect on the status of adjuncts in Austronesian languages as well as the repercussions this has on analyzing Austronesian clause structure. The most obvious motivation for this shift is that much less is known about adjuncts in Austronesian languages. Secondly, studying the syntax of adjuncts in other languages has regularly been a catalyst in developing more fine-grained theories of phrase structure and locality. Thirdly, recent controversies about the nature of adverb placement, i.e. whether or not it is governed by a universal hierarchy of functional projections, has made a survey of less well documented language types such as Austronesian languages more urgent, not the least because an initial study of Malagasy adverb order indicated an interesting kind of confirmation of the formalist / universalist hypothesis. We will now proceed as follows. Section 1 provides a rough sketch of the three "big questions" of Austronesian syntax mentioned above. Section 2 will then be devoted to adjuncts and briefly document some of the most
The purpose of these introductory remarks is to complement the following case studies by Ferenc Kiefer on majd 'later (on), sooner or later', Attila Péteri on hadd 'let', and Ildikó Vaskó on persze 'of course'. What we will do is sketch a number of what we consider promising theoretical developments that have a bearing on the issues raised in these studies. In a section addressing issues of form (section 2), we discuss "cartographic" approaches to adverb(ial) hierarchies and the clausal "left periphery", as well as pragmatic markers within clause types. In a section focusing on issues of interpretation (section 3), we deal with pragmatic markers from the perspective of "projective meaning" and "conversational moves".
In this paper, we present data of German integrated verb second clauses and verb final relative clauses that seem problematic for a compositional analysis. We show that although the compositional analysis of restrictive relative clauses in [Janssen, T. M. (1982). In: Groenendijk et al. (eds.) Formals Methods in the study of Language (pp. 237-276). Amsterdam: UvA publications] can be adapted, it cannot be sustained due to overgeneration and must be considered unintuitive in light of the paratactic syntactic analysis for the verb second clauses from Gärtner [(2001). Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 3, 97-141]. Hence we present a conceptually simpler analysis along the lines of [Endriss and Gärtner, 2005 In: F.-J. d'Avis (ed.) Deutsche Syntax: Empirie und Theorie, (pp. 195-220). Göteborg], which makes use of information structural properties of the involved clauses. We conclude with a brief discussion on the compositional status of such an approach.
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