Edited by Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio and Chiara De Bastiani
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 275] 2022
► pp. 235–252
This paper investigates the correlation of information structure (givenness) and the extraposition of relative clauses from Early New High German (16th century) to early Modern German (19th century) via a corpus study of letters. It aims to determine whether relative clauses with a high proportion of new referents are more likely to be extraposed because new referents put more strain on the working memory and can therefore be better interpreted at a position where more memory capacities are available again (Gibson 1989) and help spread the information of the whole sentence more evenly (Levy & Jaeger 2007). Another goal of the paper is to show that there is a decreasing influence of information structure on extraposition over the centuries. It will be shown that there is evidence for both hypotheses put forward in the paper.