Edited by Michael T. Putnam
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 144] 2009
► pp. 57–90
An analysis of German Left Dislocation is proposed which combines the findings in recent work on the construction with a theoretical model of syntactic derivation that dispenses with the existence of the EPP-feature. The findings at stake are basically those in Frey (2000, 2004a), where it is shown that the topical character of left-dislocated structures is the result of movement of the D-pronoun to a middle-field, and not a pre-field, topic projection. The theoretical model adopted is ‘Survive Minimalism’ (Stroik, 2009; Putnam, 2007; Putnam and Stroik, in progress). The core of the proposal is that ‘Merge’ of both the D-pronoun and the left-dislocated XP with C is triggered by the presence of a [+REF] feature on the three heads, as in Stroik’s (2009) account of English wh-constructions with a pair-list reading.