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Part of
Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives
Edited by Antje Dammel and Oliver Schallert
[Studies in Language Companion Series 207] 2019
► pp. 311–342

Strong or weak?

Or: How information structure governs morphosyntactic variation

| University of Frankfurt
This paper discusses morphological variation that is pragmatically determined. We focus on the distribution of personal pronouns and definite articles which both systematically show at least two different morphological forms – full and reduced – and we claim that their syntactic distribution depends on pragmatic factors. We show that the distribution of the various forms of both personal pronouns and definite articles obeys similar, yet not identical restrictions. Thereby we concentrate on four phenomena: deixis, relative clauses, contrastive focus, and contrastive topic. Whereas in the first two contexts the full forms must occur obligatorily, pronouns and articles show a more fine-grained sensitivity for the latter cases. We conclude from this that pronouns and definite articles have different complex syntactic structures.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The two definite articles in South Hessian: Form and distribution
    • 2.1The current research status in a nutshell
    • 2.2The situation in South Hessian – an empirical research
    • 2.3Why focus also exists in the DP – evidence for a split-DP hypothesis
  • 3.Pronouns: Form and distribution
    • 3.1In general
    • 3.2The morphosyntax of pronouns in German dialects
    • 3.3Strongly vs. weakly used pronouns
  • 4.Comparison
  • 5.Analysis
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.207.11wei
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