Syntaktische Merkmale von übrigens in seiner Hauptposition: Im Mittelfeld des Verb-Zweit-Satzes. [Syntactic features of übrigens (by the way) in its main position: in the mid-field of verb-second sentences.]

Abstract

M. Egbert, Syntaktische Merkmale von übrigens in seiner Hauptposition 1 Maria Egbert Syntaktische Merkmale von übrigens in seiner Hauptposition: Im Mittelfeld des Verb-Zweit-Satzes 1This study analyzes the syntactic positioning of 105 instances of the German word übrigens (roughly translated into English as by the way or incidentally), as it occurs in a corpus of written language and spontaneous everyday conversation. Whereas theoretically, übrigens can be placed in different sentence types, and within these sentence types in a large number of syntactic positions, the empirical analysis yields that in everyday conversation, übrigens holds one main position in one type of sentence: the mid-field position in verb-second sentences. In terms of information structure and theme/rheme organization, übrigens in mid-field position divides the sentence into two parts. The sentence part prior to übrigens is low in information and thematic content, whereas the sentence part immediately following übrigens is topically more dense. In contrast to other positions, übrigens in its mid-field position is not connected to abrupt topic shifts.