Fragen der Koordination und der Subordination stehen seit langer Zeit im Fokus sprachwissenschaftlicher Forschung. Während in den 70er und auch noch in den 80er Jahren die Analyse der als kanonisch zu bezeichnenden Fälle im Vordergrund stand, drängten sich in den letzten 30 Jahren vor allem Grenzfälle wie weil-V2-Sätze, abhängige V2-Sätze, selbständige und weiterführende VL-Sätze etc. in das Zentrum des Interesses. Die Beiträge zum vorliegenden Band bauen auf den Erkenntnissen dieser Arbeiten auf, ergänzen sie aber systematisch um eine breit angelegte Diskussion typologischer, diachroner und erwerbstheoretischer Aspekte. Ein weiteres zentrales Anliegen der Arbeiten besteht darin,die theoretischen Konzepte zur Modellierung relevanter Strukturbedeutungen (z.B. V2) zu präzisieren. Linguistic research has focussed on issues related to coordination and subordination for a long time. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, the main concern was the analysis of canonical clause structure, the interest shifted towards non-canonical phenomena such as weil-verb-second-clauses, dependent verb-second-clauses, independent and continuative verb-final clauses etc. The contributions to this issue build on findings of these studies, at the same time systematically adding a broad discussion of typological, diachronic and acquisition-related aspects. A further central concern of the studies is to make precise theoretical concepts of modelling the semantics of relevant structural configurations, such as verb-second.

This book offers a fresh take on several long-standing issues relating to the (non-)truth-conditional interpretation of epistemic, evidential, hearsay and attitudinal sentence adverbials. Drawing on a wealth of data from English and German, it shows for the first time that all four adverbial classes can have both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional (parenthetical) readings. A novel account is presented according to which (non-)truth-conditional readings may arise at either the syntactic or the pragmatic level. Couched in relevance theory, the book also re-examines the explicature and illocutionary status of the adverbial qualification and the qualified proposition, and refines the notions of pointhood and at-issueness to provide an original information-structural analysis applicable to not just sentence adverbials but a range of other propositional qualifiers. Finally, the investigation identifies five factors affecting (non-)truth-conditional interpretation: linear position, prosody, the semantics of the adverbial, its information-structural properties and the wider context. The book will be of interest to those interested in relevance theory, the semantics/pragmatics interface, the syntax/pragmatics interface and information structure, as well as for syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists interested in sentence adverbials, other propositional qualifiers and parentheticality, syntactic and interpretational.

This collection presents novel insights into the micro- and macro-variation of causal clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. It contains a general introduction to the topic setting the scene and nine chapters based on data from Dutch, German, English, Icelandic, Chinese, and Japanese. Topics discussed in the individual chapters involve, inter alia, external, internal and linear syntax of adverbial clauses expressing a causal relation, their semantic interpretation and information-structural properties, verb position, volitionality, and the development of particular causal conjunctions. The findings gained here are of synchronic and diachronic nature and offer new theoretical perspectives on how causal dependency relationships are expressed by inherent causal morpho-syntactic patterns. They also provide a deeper comprehension of how sentential modifiers work, emerge, and develop in general. This volume is an asset to grammarians, syntacticians, theoretical, and historical linguists.

This book opens with Angelika Kratzer and Luigi Rizzi talking about contemporary issues, such as non-recursiveness of focus and the semantics of topics. The chapters climb down the spine from the left periphery to DP: the value of subjunctive across the history of German, expressive expressions in Brazilian Portuguese, left and right dislocation and the speaker’s perspective in Italian, Brazilian double subjects and left dislocated topic, long versus short wh-movement in Brazilian Portuguese and Quebec French, low adverbs and the raising of the verb in Brazilian Portuguese, ellipsis and null objects in Brazilian and European Portuguese, and bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese. The chapters propose original accounts for language variation and historical changes, most of them focusing on Brazilian Portuguese, a challenge to syntax and semantics. Thus, the volume contributes to Brazilian and Portuguese Linguistics, as well as to general and contemporary research on syntax and semantics of natural languages.

Relative clauses play a hugely important role in analysing the structure of sentences. This book provides the first evidence that a unified analysis of the different types of relative clauses is possible - a step forward in our understanding. Using careful analyses of a wide range of languages, Cinque argues that the relative clause types can all be derived from a single, double-headed, structure. He also presents evidence that restrictive, maximalizing, ('integrated') non-restrictive, kind-defining, infinitival and participial RCs merge at different heights of the nominal extended projection. This book provides an elegant generalization about the structure of all relatives. Theoretically profound and empirically rich, it promises to radically alter the way we think about this subject for years to come.

This book offers the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property. It includes formal theoretical work alongside psycholinguistic and language acquisition studies, examines data from a range of languages, and shows that V2 phenomena are much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought.

This book investigates phenomena at the grammar–discourse interface with a strong focus on discourse markers, whose development and concrete uses in a given language tend to be based on a close interplay of grammatical and discourse-related forces. The topics range from the transition of linguistic signs “out of” sentence grammar and “into” the domain of discourse to differences between more grammatical vs. more discourse-pragmatic expressions in terms of structural behavior and cognitive processing, and the different, intricate ways in which the usage conditions and meanings of grammatical constituents or structural units are affected by the discourse context in which they are used. The twelve studies in this book are based on fresh empirical data from languages such as English, Basque, Korean, Japanese and French and involve the study of linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles, comment clauses, expletives, adverbial connectors, and expressives.

This book considers the null-subject phenomenon, whereby some languages lack an overtly realized referential subject in specific contexts. It explores novel empirical data and new theoretical analyses covering the major approaches to null subjects in generative grammar, and examines a wide range of languages from different families.

Inhalt: Sonja Müller & Mailin Antomo: Introduction Frank Sode & Hubert Truckenbrodt: Verb position, verbal mood, and root phenomena in German Nathalie Staratschek: Desintegrierte weil-Verbletzt-Sätze – Assertion oder Sprecher-Commitment? Rita Finkbeiner: Warum After Work Clubs in Berlin nicht funktionieren. Zur Lizensierung von w-Überschriften in deutschen Pressetexten Imke Driemel: Variable verb positions in German exclamatives Ulrike Demske: Syntax and discourse structure: verb-final main clauses in German Janina Beutler: V1-declaratives and assertion Julia Bacskai-Atkari: Clause typing in main clauses and V1 conditionals in Germanic Ines Rehbein, Hans G. Müller & Heike Wiese: The hidden life of V3: an overlooked word order variant on verb-second Ciro Greco & Liliane Haegeman: Initial adverbial clauses and West Flemish V3 Artemis Alexiadou & Terje Lohndal: V3 in Germanic: a comparison of urban vernaculars and heritage languages Volker Struckmeier & Sebastian Kaiser: Just how compositional are sentence types?

The papers in this volume focus on the impact of information structure on language acquisition, thereby taking different linguistic approaches into account. They start from an empirical point of view, and examine data from natural first and second language acquisition, which cover a wide range of varieties, from early learner language to native speaker production and from gesture to Creole prototypes. The central theme is the interplay between principles of information structure and linguistic structure and its impact on the functioning and development of the learner's system. The papers examine language-internal explanatory factors and in particular the communicative and structural forces that push and shape the acquisition process, and its outcome. On the theoretical level, the approach adopted appeals both to formal and communicative constraints on a learner’s language in use. Two empirical domains provide a 'testing ground' for the respective weight of grammatical versus functional determinants in the acquisition process: (1) the expression of finiteness and scope relations at the utterance level and (2) the expression of anaphoric relations at the discourse level.