Full Description
This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into central aspects of clause structure and word order, outlining the different stages of their historical development. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis with descriptive generalizations, supported by a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. Reference is also made throughout to the more traditional descriptive model of the German clause.
The volume is divided into three parts that correspond to the main parts of the clause. Part I explores the left periphery, looking at verb placement (verb second and competing orders), the prefield, and adverbial connectives, while Part II discusses the middle field, including pronominal syntax, the order of full NPs, and the history of negation. The final part examines the right periphery with chapters covering basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in historical syntax and the Germanic languages, and for both descriptive and theoretical linguists alike.
Contents
1: Agnes Jäger, Gisella Ferraresi, and Helmut Weiß: Introduction
PART I: The Left Periphery
2: Svetlana Petrova: Introduction to Part I
3: Katrin Axel-Tober: Origins of verb-second in Old High German
4: Svetlana Petrova: Verb-initial declaratives in Old High German and in later German
5: Augustin Speyer and Helmut Weiß: The prefield after the Old High German period
6: Gisella Ferraresi: Adverbial connectives
PART II: The Middle Field
7: Gisella Ferraresi and Agnes Jäger: Introduction to Part II
8: Helmut Weiß: The Wackernagel complex and pronoun raising
9: Augustin Speyer: Serialization of full noun phrases in the history of German
10: Anne Breitbarth and Agnes Jäger: History of negation in High and Low German
Part III: The Right Periphery
11: Eric Fuß: Introduction to Part III
12: Eric Fuß: The OV-VO alternation in Early German: Diagnostics for basic word order
13: Svetlana Petrova and Helmut Weiß: OV vs VO in Old High German: The case of thaz-clauses
14: Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova: Prosodic and information-structural factors in word order variation
15: Augustin Speyer: Periphrastic verb forms
16: Agnes Jäger: On the history of the IPP construction in German
17: Augustin Speyer: The ACI construction in the history of German
