13. German vorfeld-filling as constraint interaction

Augustin Speyer | University of Pennsylvania

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.

Published online: 10 April 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.172.13spe

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Burmester, Juliane, Antje Sauermann, Katharina Spalek & Isabell Wartenburger

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.

Speyer, Augustin

2019. What does a verb? Indicate sentence type. The Mental Lexicon 14:2 ► pp. 319 ff.

Wierzba, Marta & Gisbert Fanselow

2020. Factors influencing the acceptability of object fronting in German. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 77 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 september 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.