Topics in Zurich German Syntax Kathrin £. Cooper Ph.D. University
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Topics in Zurich German Syntax Kathrin £. Cooper Ph.D. University of Edinburgh 1994 UI Abstract The primary aim of this thesis is to present a range of hitherto undiscussed data illustrating syntactic phenomena of Zurich German, with a view to establishing the structure of the Zurich German clause. Zurich German is an Alemannic dialect of German spoken in Switzerland. Like other Swiss dialects of German, it is almost exclusively a spoken language and has no written standard. Its syntax is therefore not subject to normative rules and provides a valuable object of study against the background of standardised German, Dutch, English, and other Germanic languages. The syntactic theory underlying this investigation is Government and Binding Theory. Chapter One presents a brief introduction to the language and previous literature, as well as a discussion of methodological and theoretical aspects. The focus of Chapter Two is on the word order freedom in the middle field {Mittelfeld) and on the question of an obligatory subject position. It is argued that there is no strong evidence for functional heads other than COMP and that the middle field is best described in terms of a verb projection only. Chapter Three discusses the distribution of clitic pronouns and concludes that subject clitics are lexical clitics, while object clitics are phonological clitics. Cases of apparent referential null subjects are analysed in terms of silent clitics, i.e. clitics with an unexpressed phonetic form. Chapter Four looks at the properties of the clause-initial position (SpecCP) and the second position (COMP) in root and embedded contexts. "Doubly-filled COMP" is discussed and some of the standard assumptions regarding long movement through SpecCP are questioned. Chapter Five deals with the verbal complex and what has become known as Verb Projection Raising. This chapter proposes a new analysis of the notoriously numerous word order possibilities in infinitival complement constructions in terms of deriving them from a right-branching base structure. IV Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1 1. Why Zurich German 1 2. What is Zurich German? 2 3. Methodological considerations 4 4. On grammatically 6 5. Aims of this thesis 10 Chapter 2: The structure of the middle field 12 1. Introduction 12 2. Linearisation of arguments 14 2.1. Case and ambiguities 14 2.2. Lenerz( 1977) 19 2.3. Höhle (1982) 24 2.4. Functional approaches 28 2.5. Uszkoreit (1987) 31 2.6. Pronouns 32 2.7. Adverbs, particles, and prepositional objects 35 2.8. Conclusions 39 3. Configurationality 39 3.1. Coordination 40 3.2. Fronting 41 3.3. Does the middle field contain a functional projection? 42 3.3.1. Evidence for INFL in English 43 3.3.2. Arguments against INFL 44 3.3.3. Arguments for INFL 47 3.3.4. For and against SpecIP 50 3.3.5. Diesing (1992) - two subject positions 54 3.3.6. Further considerations and conclusions 58 3.4. On scrambling and the structure of the VP 60 3.4.1. Remnant VP movement 63 3.4.2. Binding and scope 65 V 4. Summary and outlook 70 Chapter 3: Personal pronouns and null referential subjects 74 0. Introduction 74 1. Pronominal clitics 74 1.1. Morphophonology 74 1.2. Syntax 78 1.2.1. Clitics inside VP 81 1.2.2. Object clitics in the middle field 82 1.2.3. Clitics adjacent to COMP 85 1.2.4. Pronouns and clitics in SpecCP 86 1.3. Towards an analysis 90 2. Null referential subjects 94 2.1. The data 95 2.1.1. Second singular null subjects 95 2.1.2. Constraints on null singular subjects 98 2.1.3. Null first singular subjects 99 2.2. An analysis 101 2.2.1. The role of inflection 101 2.2.2. Subject pronouns 103 2.2.3. The status of-/ 106 2.2.4. A diachronic perspective 107 2.3. ZH null subjects as silent clitics - further discussion 110 Chapter 4: COMP and prefield 114 1. Introduction 114 2. The clause-initial position(s) 117 2.1. On topicalisation - topic and focus 118 2.2. Analysing fronting: Cardinaletti (1986) et alia 124 2.3. Verb-second violations in Yiddish 131 2.4. Topicalisation versus adjunction to IP 133 2.5. Topicalisation versus wh-movement 135 2.6. Long movement in ZH 137 vi 2.7. Real topicalisation: discourse prominence 143 2.8. Null topics 148 2.9. Subject-verb inversion in V2 and VI complements 151 Chapter 5: The verbal complex 153 1. Introduction 153 2. Verb Raising and Extraposition 154 3. Verb Projection Raising 158 4. Verb Projection Raising versus Extraposition? 160 5. Coherent versus incoherent constructions 162 5.1. Verbs embedding bare infinitivals 163 5.2. Verbs embedding z-infinitivals 165 6. The categorial status of infinitival complements 167 6.1. Scrambling 167 6.2. Coordination 169 6.3. Subcategorisation 170 6.4. COMP in infinitivals 171 7. On raising and control 173 7.1. Raising verbs and modal verbs 173 7.2. Perception verbs and laa 179 8. Towards an analysis 184 8.1. Diagnostics for bare verb clusters 185 8.2. Infinitivus pro Participio (IPP) 186 8.3. Diagnostics for z-verb clusters 187 8.4. On the status of the infinitival marker z 189 9. Analysis 192 9.1. Verb clustering and inversion 192 9.2. Scope 197 9.3. Transparent versus opaque infinitival complements 199 9.4. Concluding remarks 205 Bibliography 206 1 Chapter 1: Introduction 1. Why Zurich German In recent years, Swiss German dialects have received considerable attention within generative grammar. Shieber (1985) showed that Zurich German displays constructions with crossed dependencies, as in (1), and he proved that only a non-context-free grammar can generate these.1'2 1. dass mer d Chind em Hans s Huus lönd hälfe aaschtriiche that we the kids the H. the house let help paint "that we let the children help Hans paint the house" The syntax of the Zurich German verb complex in constructions like (1), which is the subject of Chapter 5 of this thesis, also gained widespread attention through work by den Besten & Edmondson (1983) as well as by Haegeman & van Riemsdijk (1986), which established the notion of "Verb Projection Raising" on the basis of Zurich German and West Flemish data. In addition to displaying a considerable amount of word order variation in the verbal complex and in the clause in general, Zurich German is also notable for its use of clitic pronouns and null referential subjects. Null subjects and clitics have been at the centre of syntactic investigations in recent years, and the interaction between the two is explored in Chapter 3. On a more general note, it can be said that recently there has been a surge of interest in dialect syntax and the past few years have seen the emergence of a number of dialect studies.3 Modern syntactic theory focuses on spoken language, and a dialect is a particularly interesting object of research because it displays none of the 1 Regarding the issue of generative power the reader is referred to Pullum & Gazdar (1982) and Shieber (1985). For the same argument for context-freeness based on similar Dutch data, cf. Bresnanetal(1982). 2 The spelling employed in this thesis is my own, and does not distinguish as many shades of vowels as Dieth (1986), who proposes a standard orthography for all Swiss dialects. 3 To mention just a few, Haegeman (1992) on West Flemish, Penner & Bader (e.g. 1992) on Bernese German, and the papers in Benincä (1989) and Abraham .& Bayer (1993). CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 2 distortions due to prescriptive norms and can thus be said to provide a more direct insight into the nature of language.4 2. What is Zurich German? Zurich German - "Züritüütsch" to natives, "Zürichdeutsch" to Germans, and henceforth abbreviated as "ZH" - is an Alemannic dialect of German spoken in Zurich and its vicinity, by approximately one million speakers. More precisely, the dialect belongs to the High Alemannic group, which extends into Southern Germany (but does not include Swabian) and Western Austria (Vorarlberg). Apart from the dialect of Basel, which is Low Alemannic, all Swiss German dialects are High Alemannic (Russ 1990).5 There is considerable variation between the many dialects, but three groups can be distinguished: The Northeast with ZH as its main representative, the Northwest with the dialect of Bern most prominent, and the South with the archaic Highest Alemannic dialects of the remote mountain regions, such as the Walser dialects.6 The term "Swiss German" refers collectively to all the Low, High and Highest Alemannic dialects within the Swiss borders,7 but there is no Swiss German as such, i.e. there is no standard dialect spoken by everyone, nor is there a standard written form. The language situation in the Germanic part of Switzerland is diglossic, with Standard German employed for written and more formal purposes, such as national news programmes, speeches in parliament, and lectures, while the dialects are used for everything else. The use of dialect is thus in no way a class indication, as is the case in many other countries (Clyne 1984); it merely reveals the regional origin of the speaker. As mentioned above, the Swiss German dialects are not usually written. There exists however a small "subculture" of dialect literature, 4 Cf. Benincä (1989:1): "Dialects are in a sense particularly 'natural' linguistic objects, less exposed as they are to standardization processes or other types of correction of their natural development" 5 High Alemannic is delimited in the north by the Kind/Chind isogloss. 6 Cf. Comrie & Frauenfelder (1992) on the Walser dialect of Bosco-Gurin.