The filling of the vorfeld (= clause-initial position in German declarative clauses) depends on information structural rather than strictly syntactic constraints. Referential phrases of one of the following three types are eligible for the vorfeld: scene-setting elements, contrastive elements and topics. The main point of this paper is to show that these types seem to be ranked: scene-setting elements are the most likely ones to appear in the vorfeld, followed by contrastive elements and finally by topics. Note that topics are thus not the preferred vorfeld-fillers even in German (see Speyer 2007; Frey 2004a). The difference in likelihood to be in the vorfeld can be modelled by an Optimality Theoretic account that is sketched out in this paper.
2018. Sensitivity to salience: linguistic vs. visual cues affect sentence processing and pronoun resolution. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33:6 ► pp. 784 ff.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2011. Norwegian (non-V2) declaratives, resumptive elements, and the Wackernagel position. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 34:2 ► pp. 179 ff.
Felce, Catherine, C. Granget, M.-A. Dat, D. Guedat-Bittighoffer & C. Cuet
2017. La mise en œuvre de schémas d’usage au service de la construction de l’énoncé en allemand L2. SHS Web of Conferences 38 ► pp. 00003 ff.
Fricke, Lea
2020. A southern German use of prefield-eses: Evidence from the corpus and an experimental study. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 39:1 ► pp. 41 ff.
Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara
2016. The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure,
Speyer, Augustin
2012. Stress clash and word order changes in the left periphery in Old English and Middle English. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ► pp. 873 ff.
2020. Factors influencing the acceptability of object fronting in German. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 77 ff.
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