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Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages
Edited by Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213] 2014
► pp. 313–340

Object position and Heavy NP Shift in Old Saxon and beyond

| University of Manchester

This paper investigates the position of ‘heavy’ nominal objects in Old Saxon and other Germanic languages. A new empirical study of Old Saxon is carried out and regression analysis performed, with information status, grammatical weight and case all serving as predictors. On the theoretical side it is argued that an analysis in terms of movement to specifier positions in a low left periphery goes some of the way towards capturing the observed facts, but still suffers from certain problems.

Published online: 7 May 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.213.12wal
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