Correlative es vs. das in German
An empirical perspective
In the last few decades, the role of correlative elements in recursive sentence embedding has received considerable attention. In the theoretical literature on German, it has been argued that the syntax of correlative constructions is not homogeneous and that one has to distinguish between so-called pro-form and placeholder constructions. In this paper, we give empirical evidence for distinguishing between these two uses, by focusing on two correlative lexemes: es and das. Furthermore, we present psycholinguistic and corpus-based support for the differentiation of two verb classes regarding the realizations of correlative elements.