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Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology

Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology - Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

Hardback (22 Apr 2002)

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Publisher's Synopsis

This book takes up a variety of general syntactic topics, which either yield different solutions in German, in particular, or which lead to different conclusions for theory formation. One of the main topics is the fact that languages that allow for extensive scrambling between the two verbal poles, V-2 and V-last, need to integrate discourse functions like thema and rhema into the grammatical description. This is attempted, in terms of Minimalism, thus extending the functional domain. Special attention is given to the asymmetrical scrambling behavior of indefinites vs. definites and their semantic interpretation. Related topics are: Transitive expletive sentences, types of existential sentences with either BE or HAVE, the that-trace phenomenon and its semantics, negative polarity items, ellipsis and gapping, passivization, double negation - all of which have extensive effects both on distributional behavior and semantic disambiguation, reaching far beyond effects observable in English with its rigid, 'un-scrambable' word order.

Book information

ISBN: 9789027227669
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Imprint: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Pub date:
Number of pages: 354
Weight: 580g
Height: 225mm
Width: 164mm