Augustin Speyer

Die Bedeutung der Centering Theory für Fragen der Vorfeldbesetzung im Deutschen

Abstract The Vorfeld (prefield) of German declarative V2 main clauses is syntactically underdetermined: It is only required that one phrase stands there, but it is not determined what kind of phrase. This is consequently determined by information structure. The goal of this paper is to look whether Centering Theory can make any predictions; this question is addressed after an overview is given over potential forms in which the center can appear. It turns out that the Center is actually not out very often into the prefield; movement to the prefield seems to work in accordance with a ranking of the form: scene-setting elements outrank poset elements with respect to prefield movement, and poset elements outrank centers. If another part of Centering Theory is taken into account, namely coherence relations, we see that the more coherent the connection between two clauses is, the more often is the Center in the prefield. From that follows that one of the tasks of the prefield is to mark local coherence.

Variation and its determinants: A corpus-based study of German schwa in the letters of Goethe

Abstract This paper studies some factors governing the presence or absence of word-final schwa in German. To obtain data as homogeneous as possible we focus on three adverbs outside morphological paradigms, namely, heut(e) ‘today’, gern(e) ‘willingly’, and bald(e) ‘soon’, in one particular text type, the letters written by one and the same person, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Apart from lexical differences between the items studied and change over time, various phonological factors are shown to be important, most prominently the accent pattern of the following word (schwa tends to be present if the first syllable of the following word is accentuated), foot structure, and the initial segment of the following word. Statistical analyses, both for the individual factors and their (potential) interactions, reveal significant patterns at work behind the variation. For gern(e) the most important factors are purely phonological while for heut(e) the type of the following boundary and the position in the sentence is crucial.

Factors determining the choice of anaphora in Old High German – A survey of zero and personal pronoun usage in Otfrid

This paper attempts to work towards an explanation of the variation between personal pronouns and zero pronouns in an Old High German text, the Evangelienbuch by Otfrid von Weißenburg. Old High German is a stage of the German language, having lasted until around 1050 AD, in which there is still considerable variation between personal and zero pronouns in anaphoric usage (Schrodt 2004: 73–75.). The study is to be understood as a pilot study; so mostly it is a review of possible factors inducing the variation. It is premature to come to a clear conclusion, in the sense, Factor A in combination with Factor B favours (or even: determines) the use of zero pronoun, while Factor C does not, but what we can do is to identify the factors that show an eect in isolation. The interplay between dierent factors has not been addressed here, this is left for future investigation.1 I assume that the choice between personal and zero pronouns directly depends on the salience of the referents, in the sense of thewell-knownprinciple going back to Ariel (1990), that themore salient a referent is, the less substantial the expression is that is used to refer to this referent (cf. also Ellert 2010; Jaeger 2010:

Auch früher wollte man informieren – Zum Einfluss der Informationsstruktur auf die Syntax in der Geschichte des Deutschen

Abstract Theoretical insights achieved by research on information structure in the past 30 years have recently begun to be adopted by researchers working diachronically on German syntax. Several aspects, especially to Old High German syntax, have been investigated, but there are many desiderata and a synthesis is still missing. From these studies we can say that the influence of information structure on syntax has changed: While in Old High German all ‘fields’ of the clause have a special information structural assignment (up to the point that the presence/absence of a field is correlated to the presence/absence of a certain information structural category), in Modern German the prefield and the afterfield are multifunctional, whereas information structural ordering occurs only in the middle field. Some information structural dimensions have gained importance, e. g. the old-new distinction for object order.

Die Freiheit der Mittelfeldabfolge im Deutschen. Ein modernes Phänomen

Modern German is a language with relatively ›free‹ word order, i. e.: the serialization of constituents is dependent not only on syntactic requirements, but determined also by information structural or cognitive factors. As the same is true for Proto-Indoeuropean, it is tempting to assume that German perpetuates the PIE word order freedom. A corpus study of the relative order of accusative and dative object, using several Early New High German texts from the time between 1350 and 1550, stemming from 4 different dialect areas, shows that this assumption is wrong: German underwent a period of strictly syntactically governed constituent order (dative object before accusative object) which began before the Old High German period and lasted into the 16th century. Information structural or cognitive factors do not play a role for serializastion in this period. The relative position of the objects must be separated from the question of ›scrambling‹ in the sense that material is moved to the left of the subject, as we find examples of constituent order dative object before subject early on.

On the Change of Word Stress in the History of German

Word stress in German is usually thought of as following the Germanic stress pattern (main stress on first stem syllable); quasi-monomorphemic words like Forélle or Holúnder suggest, however, that Modern German follows a Latinate stress pattern (last syllable extrametrical; stress on the penultima or the antepenultima, depending on weight of the second-to-last syllable). The change in stress pattern occurred in the 16th and 17th century, judging from evidence of metrical texts, due to a heavy influx of Latin and Romance loan words in this period, which followed the Latinate stress pattern and were taken as sample for the stressing of monomorphemic words longer than two syllables.