Word Order Variation and Gapping in German Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in Language and Linguistics Lotus Goldberg, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts by Tamar Forman-Gejrot May 2016 Copyright by Tamar Forman-Gejrot ABSTRACT This thesis brings German data to bear on the question of what types of parallelism in linear order and syntactic structure are needed between the antecedent and target conjuncts of Gapping sentences, looking at a range of possible word order variations in each of the conjuncts. As a language with pervasive use of Scrambling, Topicalization, and verb-second ordering – which, in turn, is a significant factor responsible for its relatively free word order – German allows the investigation of a range of alternative word orders and syntactic positions in the antecedent and remaindered material of Gapping, and so is an ideal language in which to investigate these issues. I will present a set of empirical syntactic generalizations at work in the data, including most notably a requirement that an argument that is scrambled in the antecedent conjunct must be the counterpart of an overt remnant in the target conjunct, as well as a number of limitations for the possible positions of a remnant whose antecedent counterpart is topicalized. However, it appears to be the case that such syntactic restrictions may be overridden by linear parallelism traits such as matching linear order between the arguments of the antecedent and target conjuncts or a canonical ordering of target conjunct remnants. The mechanism by which linear order seems to improve on otherwise ungrammatical utterances is most likely due to separate processing issues. Independently of the syntactic and linear order generalizations, this thesis presents a (to my knowledge) new and mostly unstudied, body of data, which can be used in future research regarding issues of prosody and information structure, processing, and naturally, continued work on Gapping and word order variation, particularly Scrambling. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor Lotus Goldberg, who introduced me to the field of theoretical linguistics, thereby giving a home to my curiosity about language, and who sparked my interest in research. Thank you for providing your knowledge, time, and patience throughout this process, and for the rich and detailed comments, feedback, and questions that have pushed me to think critically, and that have enabled me to bring the work to this point. Additionally, my gratitude goes out to my second and third readers Sophia Malamud and James Pustejovsky who took the time to read my work and share their ideas with me. Thank you also to the Program of Language and Linguistics at Brandeis University in general, and especially to the professors from whom I have learned so much over these four years, including those already mentioned as well as Keith Plaster and Nianwen Bert Xue. In addition to the linguistics faculty, I would like to thank Antonella DiLillo and Pamela Wolfe who have taken a particular interest in my personal and professional development. I would also like to thank all of the native German speakers whose time spent on providing judgments for such complex sentences was invaluable for this investigation. I truly appreciate all of your efforts with the data and the dizzying chaos it must have caused in your heads for the remainder of the day. Furthermore, I would not have been able to keep up my energy and motivation for this project without the support of my friends and family in Germany, Sweden, and the US, as well on the Brandeis University campus. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The goal of this thesis ...............................................................................................................1 1.2 The basics of Gapping ..............................................................................................................2 1.3 The basics of German syntax ...................................................................................................11 1.4 Major research questions ..........................................................................................................18 1.5 Initial details of the methodology ............................................................................................19 1.6 Findings .......................................................................................................................................20 2 Syntactic assumptions and Gapping hypotheses ...................................................... 21 2.1 Theoretical assumptions and the syntactic basics of German derivations .......................21 2.1.1 The basics of derivations in Minimalism for English .............................................22 2.1.2 Minimalist derivations in German .............................................................................27 2.2 The Basic Hypothesis ................................................................................................................34 2.3 Eliminating the CP-domain for Gapping ...............................................................................49 2.4 Introducing constituent deletion .............................................................................................51 3 Examined data ........................................................................................................... 56 3.1 Transitive verbs ..........................................................................................................................57 3.2 Ditransitive verbs with two-remnant target conjuncts and matching linear order ..........63 3.3 Ditransitive verbs with two-remnant target conjuncts and non-matching linear order .71 3.4 Ditransitive verbs with three-remnant target conjuncts ......................................................77 4 Empirical generalizations and steps towards an analysis ......................................... 90 4.1 Syntactic generalizations ...........................................................................................................92 4.1.1 Constraint A – a possible contrastive function of Scrambling .............................93 4.1.1 Constraint B – Topicalization and c-command domain .......................................96 4.1.2 Constraint C – Topicalization and expectations .....................................................103 4.1.3 Constraint D – multiple Scrambling and markedness ............................................109 4.1.4 Summary of syntactic generalizations and exceptions ............................................111 4.2 Linear order generalizations .....................................................................................................114 4.2.1 Countermeasure I – quasi across-the-board movement ........................................115 4.2.2 Countermeasure II – linear canonical order ............................................................116 4.2.3 Countermeasure III – matching linear order ...........................................................117 4.2.4 Explaining linear order ................................................................................................118 4.3 Final remarks on generalizations .............................................................................................120 5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 122 Appendix A ...................................................................................................................... 125 Appendix B ...................................................................................................................... 130 Appendix C ...................................................................................................................... 134 Appendix D ...................................................................................................................... 147 References ........................................................................................................................ 149 iv 1 Introduction What we say is often as important as what we do not (say). As linguists, we are interested in peeling off the layers of language in order to discover what fundamentally underlies our competency for interpreting and producing language. Over the past decades, the study of null anaphora, including Gapping, VP-Ellipsis, Sluicing, and other processes, has preoccupied many linguists. 1.1 The goal of this thesis Gapping, originally identified by Ross (1968), has been studied to quite an extent and in a variety of languages (see e.g. Ross 1968, Hankamer 1979, Johnson 2014, Repp 2009). A prototypical example is seen in (1) below, where material that is not overt is understood to be present in the second conjunct. (1) I like apples and you (like) bananas. While there is a fairly clear picture of the basic empirical traits of Gapping, there continues to be considerable debate in the generative syntactic literature as to the construction’s syntactic derivation. My aim is to use characteristics of German word order to gain a deeper understanding of parallelism between the two conjuncts in a Gapping structure. The combination