The Syntax of German

Abstract

What do you know, if you know that a language has 'Object Verb' structure rather than 'Verb Object'? Answering this question and many others, this book provides an essential guide to the syntactic structure of German. It examines the systematic differences between German and English, which follow from this basic difference in sentence structure, and presents the main results of syntactic research on German. Topics covered include the strict word order in VO vs word order variation in OV, verb clustering, clause union effects, obligatory functional subject position, and subject-object asymmetries for extractions. Through this, a cross-model and cross-linguistic comparison evolves, highlighting the immediate implications for non-Germanic OV languages, and creating a detailed and comprehensive description of the syntactic differences that immediately follow from an OV type in contrast with a VO type like English. It will be of interest to all those interested in syntax and Germanic languages.

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

“…It shows V2 movement with all types of constituents that can be hosted by the prefield. The V2 property consists of two components: (a) Movement of the finite verb to the top-most functional head position, and (b) Movement of some XP to the specifier of this head (Haider 2010;Holmberg 2015). Put differently, the second position in German hosts only finite verbal elements; en-infinitives and verb stems are not licensed.…”

“…In line with frameworks in syntactic theory and in acquisition that postulate functional layers only when they are needed to explain the observational data, we adopt the syntactic architecture proposed by Haider (2010) for German. Accordingly, at least one functional projection exists above the VP, accommodating either the finite verb moved to the functional head position or the complementizer (for alternative assumptions, see Vikner [1995] among others).…”

“…Therefore overt verb movement from V 0 to a higher functional head is required. Alternatively, V2 is explained in terms of assertion: Verb movement to the top most functional domain (F 0 in Haider's [2010] model) allows checking the illocutionary force of the sentence, resulting in V2 (Reis 1985;Reis 1997;Wechsler 1991 among others). Note that the former accounts predict a causal relation between verb movement and finiteness and agreement marking, while the latter does not.…”

“…Note that the former accounts predict a causal relation between verb movement and finiteness and agreement marking, while the latter does not. Given the assumption above that clause-final finite verbs in German are checked in their VP-internal lexical head position (Haider 2010), we hold that the verb does not leave the VP for the sake of tense or agreement but for the sake of illocutionary force, i.e. assertion for declarative clauses.…”

“…In verb-second (V2) languages like German, the V2 position is restricted to finite verbs in the adult grammar; overtly marked non-finite forms such as en-infinitives are not licensed in this position (e.g., Haider 2010;Holmberg 2015;Vikner 1995). Typically developing (TD) monolingual children acquiring German seem to obey this ban on non-finite verbs in V2.…”