Germanic syntax Stefan Müller Draft of 26th June 2021, 09:27 Textbooks in Language Sciences Textbooks in Language Sciences Editors: Stefan Müller, Martin Haspelmath Editorial Board: Claude Hagège, Marianne Mithun, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Foong Ha Yap In this series: 1. Müller, Stefan. Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint­based approaches. 2. Schäfer, Roland. Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen. 3. Freitas, Maria João & Ana Lúcia Santos (eds.). Aquisição de língua materna e não materna: Questões gerais e dados do português. 4. Roussarie, Laurent. Sémantique formelle: Introduction à la grammaire de Montague. 5. Kroeger, Paul. Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. 6. Ferreira, Marcelo. Curso de semântica formal. 7. Stefanowitsch, Anatol. Corpus linguistics: A guide to the methodology. ISSN: 2364­6209 Germanic syntax Stefan Müller Müller, Stefan. 2021. Germanic syntax (Textbooks in Language Sciences). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/000 © 2021, Stefan Müller Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: no digital ISBN no print ISBNs! ISSN: 2364-6209 no DOI ID not assigned! Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Stefan Müller Fonts: Libertinus, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press Xhain Grünberger Str. 16 10243 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin For ??? Contents Preface v Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xv 1 A general overview of the Germanic languages 1 1.1 Languages and speakers ...................... 1 1.2 Historical remarks and relatedness between the languages ... 1 1.3 The three Germanic branches ................... 5 1.3.1 East Germanic ....................... 5 1.3.2 North Germanic ....................... 5 1.3.3 West Germanic ....................... 7 2 Phenomena 11 2.1 Order of subject, object and verb .................. 11 2.2 V2 ................................... 16 2.3 Scrambling .............................. 21 2.4 The position of adverbials ..................... 22 2.5 Embedded clauses .......................... 23 2.5.1 Embedded clauses introduced by a complementizer ... 23 2.5.2 Interrogative clauses .................... 25 2.6 The use of expletives to mark the clause type ........... 27 2.7 Verbal Complexes in OV languages ................ 28 2.8 Obligatoriness of subjects, case of subjects, and passives .... 29 2.9 Summary ............................... 31 3 Phrase structure grammars and X theory 33 3.1 Symbols and rewrite rules ..................... 33 3.2 Expanding PSG with features .................... 40 3.3 Phrase structure rules for some aspects of German syntax .... 41 3.3.1 Noun phrases ........................ 42 Contents 3.3.2 Prepositional phrases .................... 51 3.4 X theory ............................... 54 4 Valence, argument order and adjunct placement 63 4.1 Valence representations ....................... 63 4.2 Scrambling .............................. 69 4.3 SVO: Languages with fixed SV order and valence features .... 69 4.4 Immediate dominance schemata .................. 73 4.5 Scrambling and free VO/OV order ................. 78 4.6 Linear precedence rules ....................... 78 4.7 Adjuncts ............................... 81 4.8 Linking between syntax and semantics .............. 88 4.9 Alternatives ............................. 89 4.9.1 CP/TP/VP models ...................... 89 5 The verbal complex 95 6 Verb position: Verb first and verb second 107 6.1 The phenomenon .......................... 107 6.1.1 German as an SOV language ................ 109 6.1.2 Verb position in the Germanic SVO languages ...... 114 6.1.3 Verb second ......................... 116 6.2 The analysis ............................. 118 6.2.1 Verb first ........................... 118 6.2.2 Verb second ......................... 121 6.3 Alternatives ............................. 127 6.3.1 OV derived from VO: Kayne (1994) ............ 128 6.3.2 VO derived from OV: Haider (2020) ............ 129 6.3.3 Analyses of verb-initial sentences in SVO languages with- out verb-movement ..................... 129 7 Passive 133 7.1 The phenomenon .......................... 133 7.1.1 Subjects and other subjects ................ 133 7.1.2 Comparison German, Danish, English, Icelandic ..... 139 7.2 The Analysis ............................. 144 7.2.1 Structural and lexical case and the Case Principle .... 144 7.2.2 Argument reduction and case assignment: The passive . 151 ii Draft of 26th June 2021, 09:27 Contents 7.2.3 Argument extension and case assignment: AcI construc- tions ............................. 152 7.2.4 Theoretical analysis of the crosslinguistic differences .. 154 7.3 Summary ............................... 170 8 Clause types and expletives 175 8.1 The phenomena ........................... 175 8.1.1 Embedded clauses introduced by a complementizer ... 175 8.1.2 Interrogative clauses .................... 177 8.1.3 The use of expletives to mark the clause type ...... 179 8.2 The analysis ............................. 181 8.2.1 Embedded clauses introduced by a complementizer ... 181 8.2.2 Interrogative clauses .................... 183 8.2.3 A lexical rule for the introduction of expletives ..... 186 8.3 Summary ............................... 191 9 Raising 193 10 HPSG Light 195 Appendix A: Solutions 197 A.1 Phrase structure grammars and X theory ............. 197 A.2 Valency, argument order and adjunct placement ......... 201 A.3 The verbal complex ......................... 208 A.4 Verb position: Verb first and verb second ............. 211 A.5 Passive ................................ 219 A.6 Clause types and expletives ..................... 219 References 221 Index 237 Name index ................................. 237 Language index .............................. 239 Subject index ................................ 240 Draft of 26th June 2021, 09:27 iii Preface This book has two purposes: firstly the comparative analysis of the syntactic properties of the Germanic languages and secondly the introduction of a spe- cific format for the description and comparison of languages. The framework in which the analyses are couched is called HPSG light. It is based on HPSG (Pol- lard & Sag 1987; 1994) in the specific version that is described in detail in Müller (2013b). However HPSG light does not contain any complicated attribute value matrices (AVMs). If AVMs are used at all, they are reduced to the minimum con- taining a reduced set of features like ARG-ST for argument structure, COMPS for complements and SPR for specifier. All other aspects of the analyses are repre- sented in syntactic trees, which are easier to read. The idea behind the introduc- tion of HPSG light is to provide some tool for linguists who want to provide a more detailed description of a phenomenon without necessarily being forced to deal with all the technicalities. The degree of formalization corresponds to what is common in Government and Binding Theory, Minimalism, and the less formal variants of Construction Grammar. As for the one formal version of Construction Grammar that is a variant of HPSG, namely Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG, Sag 2012), HPSG light can be regarded as a light version of SBCG as well, since the differences are neglected in the abbreviated representations and trees that are used in this book. The work presented here differs from non-formal work in GB/Minimalism and Construction Grammar in an important way: it is backed up by implemented grammars that use the full version of HPSG includ- ing a semantic analysis in the framework of Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS, Copestake, Flickinger, Pollard & Sag (2005)). The detailed analyses are described in conference proceedings, journal articles and books and the reader is invited to consult these resources in case she or he is interested in the details. The im- plemented grammars are distributed with the Grammix virtual machine (Müller 2007b) and can be downloaded from the author’s web-page. The appendix of this book contains a list of sentences that were discussed in the respective chapters of this book and which are covered by the grammars of the respective languages. Readers are invited to enter the sentences into the TRALE system (De Kuthy et al. 2004; Penn 2004) that comes with Grammix and inspect the complete AVMs. Preface The book starts with two introductiory chapters: the first chapter introduces the Germanic languages providing basic facts like number of speakers, areas where they are spoken, some historical facts. Chapter two discusses the phe- nomena that are treated in the rest of the book, e.g., scrambling, placement of adverbials, passive, clause types, nonlocal dependencies. The third chapter is an introduction to Phrase Structure Grammars, which are the foundations of almost all theories since Chomsky’s (1957) formalization of structuralist ideas (Bloom- field 1933). Chapter 3 not just introduces phrase structure grammars but also grammars using abstractions over phrase structure rules ultimately resulting in very abstract grammars of the type also known from X theory (Jackendoff 1977). Chapter 4 explains how the concept of valency is combined with abstract phrase structure rules to make sure that the right number and the right kind of elements is combined with a certain word. For example, a word like laugh needs a subject and a word