114 research outputs found
On the historical development of pronouns referring to situations: The rise of pre-finite 'expletives' in German.
No full textAt least since Milsark (1974) expletives have been a major research topic in generative linguistics. However, since most relevant work has focused on the present-day languages, many aspects of the historical development of expletives are still unsettled. This applies in particular to the emergence of CP related pre-finite expletives in the history of the Germanic V2 languages. Focusing on German, this paper seeks to shed new light on the diachrony of CP expletive es ‘it’ by combining new empirical evidence gathered from a range of corpus studies with a novel theoretical perspective on the syntax and pragmatic functions of so-called ‘expletive’ elements. Paying special attention to the contexts in which pre-finite expletive es first appeared, we provide new data on linguistic and extralinguistic factors (such as text type and dialect area) that shaped its development. We show that es came to be used as a prefield filler earlier than previously thought, with the first clear cases dating to the 12th century. In addition, we will investigate the role of light frame adverbials such as thô/dô ‘then’ as potential precursors of expletive es and address the question of why the latter replaced the former in the history of German. The discussion of the historical data is embedded in a new proposal concerning the discourse function of CP-related expletives. In particular, we argue that ‘expletive’ es is not a semantically vacuous element, but rather a demonstrative element with a weak definite reading that is compatible with introducing a new situation (identified with an argument of Tense, cf. Hinterhölzl 2019) but also with continuing an established reference situation, explaining the success of es as a versatile element that anchors the utterance to the context
He then said..: Understudied deviations from V2 in Early Germanic
No full textABSTRACT This paper discusses a V3-pattern in Early Germanic that has so far not been considered independently. In this construction, a clause-initial XP is followed by the adverbial element OHG do/OE þa/OS tho (lit. ‘then’), which is directly followed by the finite verb. Based on a pilot study of the OHG translation of Tatian’s gospel harmony and the OE Blickling Homilies, it is shown that the pattern exhibits slightly different properties in OE and OHG. In OHG, the element preceding do is usually a pronominal shifting topic, while in OE, the clause-initial XP may also be a full DP that is either a shifting topic or a continuing topic. To account for these differences between OE and OHG, we argue that OE þa is first-merged as the head of a clause-medial projection that serves to mark the boundary between the topic and the focus domain. In contrast, OHG do (and OS tho) is a topic marker that is either part of the fronted shifting topic, or base-generated as a head in the left clausal periphery. As to its internal syntax, we propose a grammaticalization path for do/þa/tho in which a demonstrative adverb first turns into an adverbial discourse marker that may also serve expletive functions before it eventually grammaticalizes into the topic particle addressed in this paper
Deutsche Stützverbgefüge in Referenz- und Spezialkorpora: Vergleichsstudien mit dem DWDS-Wortprofil
No full textGrammatik und Lernerkorpora: Eine korpusorientierte Untersuchung von Präpositionalphrasen im deutschen MERLIN-Korpus
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