Words in German show several instances of a seemingly optional schwa-zero alternation, both in relation with inflected forms as well as in the final position of stems and simplex words, as in des Tag(e)s 'the day, gen. sg.', or gern(e) 'gladly'. The present paper proposes that the (non-)appearance of schwa is partially governed by a hitherto unknown prosodic parallelism: the schwacontaining form (a branching trochaic foot) is preferred whenever a neighboring word is of the same trochaic shape; and vice versa: the schwa-less form is found adjacent to another monosyllabic form. In other words, adjacent feet are required to have identical structure, binary branching (bisyllabic) or non-branching (monosyllabic).Large-scale corpora are used as the main source of evidence for the verification or falsification of the hypothesis. A diverse set of nouns and adverbs involving schwa-zero alternations were studied in appropriate phrasal contexts, both from present-day Standard German and from Early New High German. Based on comprehensive corpus counts, these phrases are tested for the hypothesis of prosodic parallelism. A series of chi square tests and a generalized linear model with mixed effects demonstrate statistically that the prosodic shapes of the target word and its adjacent form are not independent of each other. The focus of the paper is on empirical evidence for Prosodic Parallelism as a new type of prosodic constraint. The relevance of this constraint for the persistence of variation over a long period of time is discussed as well.

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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.

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