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Die Buchreihe Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) trägt wesentlich zur aktuellen linguistischen Theoriebildung im Bereich der allgemeinen und einzelsprachlichen Linguistik bei. Veröffentlicht werden hochwertige Arbeiten, die aktuelle Fragestellungen bearbeiten und die Entwicklung der Sprachwissenschaft, synchron oder diachron, empirisch oder theoretisch orientiert, vorantreiben.

This book offers a comparative study of the Germanic languages. It promotes a new approach to the OV vs. VO classification, according to which all clauses have a universal base where the internal argument is always merged in SpecVP. Word order differences and their correlates result from an interaction of checking conditions, the EPP and different types of verb movement, and from parametric variation concerning the location of the subject of predication in the I- or in the C-system. In the discussion of a range of impersonal constructions in German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Icelandic, the Mainland Scandinavian languages and English, it is shown that crosslinguistic variation as regards, e.g., the distribution of the expletive in impersonal passives and the occurrence of a Definiteness Effect in Transitive Expletive Constructions is mainly due to the choice of different kinds of 'expletive' elements (each associated with different featural make-ups which force them to show up in different positions), namely true expletives, event arguments and quasi-arguments, whereas expletive pro is shown not to exist.

This book studies insubordination using Germanic data. On a descriptive level, it distinguishes a wide number of (previously undescribed) types of complement and conditional insubordination in English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. On a theoretical level, these data are used to investigate the boundaries of insubordination, and the degree to which insubordination is a constructionally and semantically unified phenomenon.

This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses - one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit - but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.

This book argues that in order to account for the compositional behavior of many near-synonymous items, semantic analyses need to pay close attention to at least two semantic dimensions: standard assertions and conventional implicatures, which express additional side comments. The discussed phenomena are clausal adjuncts and complements in German. The new analysis of 'weil' and 'denn' ('because') shows that both contribute the same semantic operator, but one as an assertion, the other as a conventional implicature. This explains why only 'denn' can have speech-act modifying uses. This novel two-dimensional analysis is extended to other sentence adjuncts such as regular vs. relevance conditionals, although-clauses, and sentence adverbs. Further, the book investigates certain complement clauses. It analyzes sliftings as evidential-like parentheticals which contribute their meaning on the conventional implicature dimension. In contrast, German embedded verb-second clauses are shown to be truly embedded and analyzed as operating in the assertion dimension. The verb-second syntax is shown to contribute an additional epistemic component on the conventional implicature dimension.

This book sheds new light on Appositive Relative Clauses (ARCs), a structure that is generally studied from a merely syntactic point of view, in opposition to Determinative (or Restrictive) Relative Clauses (DRCs). In this volume, ARCs are examined from a discourse/pragmatic point of view, independently of DRCs, in order to provide a positive definition of the structure. After a presentation of the morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of ARCs, a taxonomy of their functions in discourse is established for both written and spoken English based on the results of a corpus-based investigation. Constraints are then defined within an information-packaging approach to syntactic structures to show why speakers choose ARCs over other competing allostructures, i.e. syntactic structures that fulfil similar discourse functions (e.g. nominal appositives, independent clauses, adverbials, noun premodifiers, topicalization). The end result is a deeper understanding of the richness of ARCs in their natural contexts of use.

The cross-linguistic differences documented in studies of relative clause attachment offer an invaluable opportunity to examine a particular aspect of bilingual sentence processing: Do bilinguals process their two languages as if they were monolingual speakers of each? This volume provides a review of existing research on relative clause attachment, showing that speakers of languages like English attach relative clauses differently than do speakers of languages like Spanish. Fernández reports the findings of an investigation with monolinguals and bilinguals, tested using speeded (\"on-line\") and unspeeded (\"off-line\") methodology, with materials in both English and Spanish. The experiments reveal similarities across the groups when the procedure is speeded, but differences with unspeeded questionnaires: The monolinguals replicate the standard cross-linguistic differences, while bilinguals have language-independent preferences determined by language dominance - bilinguals process stimuli in either of their languages according to the general preferences of monolinguals of their dominant language.

The present book is a typological study in crucial portions of the grammars of French/Romance and German/Germanic. It starts by asking: What do adverbs, pronouns and full noun phrases have in common? This question is tackled, on the one hand, from an empirical perspective by the description of relevant linguistic facts leading to significant and unexpected generalizations, and, on the other hand, from a theoretical perspective by the formalization of (i) a novel model of the Xbar-schema containing at most two Specifiers (double Spec model) and (ii) a well-defined model of Checking Theory, distinguishing A-feature checking from Abar-feature checking (Criterion). The first part of the book deals with the typology and placement of adverbs, while the second part of the book presents the application of Checking Theory, in interaction with the double Spec model of Xbar-theory, to pronouns in Romance and Germanic. The final part of the book contains a treatment of scrambling in Germanic and shows that word order variations among arguments and adverbs within the German(ic) Mittelfeld can be adequately explained in the light of the version of Checking Theory and Phrase Structure Theory developed so far for adverbs and pronouns. We are led to the conclusion that the well-known issue of word order variations can find promising solutions with the Principles & Parameters framework, on the basis of a well-defined formalization of (i) Xbar-theory, (ii) Checking Theory, (iii) clause structure composition, and (iv) locality constraints on syntactic operations and relations.

This monograph offers a new analysis of West Germanic 'Infinitivus Pro Participio' (IPP) constructions, within the framework of Optimality Theory. IPP constructions have long been problematic for syntactic theory, because a bare infinitive is preferred over the expected past participle. The book shows how the substitution of the past participle by the infinitive in IPP constructions can be captured straightforwardly if constraints are assumed to be violable. The basic idea is that IPP constructions are exceptional because they violate otherwise valid rules of the language. Thus, IPP is a 'last resort' or repair strategy, which is only visible in cases in which the past participle would be 'even worse' . Furthermore, as the choice of Optimality Theory naturally leads to a crosslinguistic account, the book systematically examines and compares infinitival constructions from seven West Germanic languages including Afrikaans, Dutch, German, West Flemish, and three Swiss German dialects.

It has often been noted that Dutch (and Frisian) reflects a particular stage of development between German and English. Phonologically, syntactically and morphologically, Dutch and German are closely related languages. Yet, there remain sufficient morphosyntactic differences in terms of language development. The contributions of this collection focus on the relationships and differences of these neighbouring West Germanic languages.