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Abstract. We present data from an empirical investigation on the dialectal variation in the syntax of German 3-verb clusters, consisting of a temporal auxiliary, a modal verb and a predicative verb. The ordering possibilities vary largely among the dialects. Some of the orders that we found only occur under particular stress assignments. We assume that these orders fulfil an information structural purpose, and that the reordering processes are only changes in the linear order of the elements which is represented exclusively at the surface syntactic level, PF (Phonetic Form). Our Optimality Theoretic account offers a multifactorial perspective on the phenomenon.

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Although verb cluster formation has long been a topic of syntactic research, many of its properties are still controversial. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing discussion by looking at verb order variation in 3-and 4-verb clusters in German on the basis of new empirical evidence. First, we present several experiments that have used the method of speeded grammaticality judgments in order to determine the orders within a verb cluster that are accepted by native speakers. A major result of our experiments is that native speakers accept more orders than are allowed in Standard German. Second, we give a theoretical account of the data which applies and extends Williams' (2003) CAT-language. We show how the variation between Standard German and the more liberal Colloquial German that was revealed in our experiments follows from slightly different lexical entries within this system. Standard German is characterized by a complexity requirement on modal verb complements that restricts verb order variation. The more liberal Colloquial German system lacks this feature and thus allows a larger variation of verb orders.

The input has two main functions in optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky (1993)