Papers

The origins of expletive there in West Germanic

The uploaded version of this paper is a draft of the paper submitted to be published in the proceedings of DiGS 12 (currently under review).

This paper challenges the general belief that German does not have an EPP feature in the traditional sense. I provide evidence that in historical stages of German, the element da was available as an expletive to fill Spec,TP. Because V2 orders make the phenomenon nearly impossible to pin down in matrix clauses, I focus on the behavior of da in subordinate clauses with an extracted subject. In a more speculative section of the paper, I suggest that the same phenomenon exists in Old English at an extremely low frequency, with þær (‘there’). These claims will prove to have serious consequences for recent antisymmetric approaches to Tense-final Germanic languages.


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The information structure of subject extraposition in Early New High German

An updated version of a paper previously uploaded to Academia.edu -- with a significantly different analysis. Versions of this paper are appearing in the proceedings of the HPSG 2011 conference, from a satellite workshop on Information Structure in Formal Grammar (this version is linked and available here for download) and in PWPL 18.1, as part of the Proceedings of the 35th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC).

This paper investigates the information-structural characteristics of extraposed subjects in Early New High German (ENHG). Based on new quantitative data from a parsed corpus of ENHG, I will argue that unlike objects, subjects in ENHG have two motivations for extraposing. First, subjects may extrapose in order to receive narrow focus, which is the pattern Bies (1996) has shown for object extraposition in ENHG. Secondly, however, subjects may extrapose in order to receive a default sentence accent, which is most visible in the case of presentational constructions. This motivation does not affect objects, which may achieve the same prosodic goal without having to extrapose. The study has two major consequences: (1) subject extraposition in ENHG demonstrates that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic structure and information structural effect (cf. Féry 2007); and (2) the overall phenomenon of DP extraposition in ENHG fits into a broader set of crosslinguistic focus phenomena which demonstrate a subject-object asymmetry (cf. Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007, Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010), raising important questions about the relationship between argument structure and information structural notions.

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Subject relatives and expletives in Early New High German

The version on this site is a draft of a paper that will appear in the proceedings of BLS 36.

This paper argues that the adverb da (“there”) was available as a subject expletive in Early New High German. This is primarily visible in clauses from which the logical subject has been extracted. Our data is drawn from a fully parsed corpus consisting of 40,000 words taken from Martin Luther’s Septembertestament, published in 1522. The element da occurs in 19% of all clauses with a subject gap (out of a sample of 401), and in each case it is clause-initial. This phenomenon does not occur in clauses without a subject gap. We will argue that the subject may optionally be extracted from its base position, leaving Spec,TP empty. An expletive is then licensed to satisfy the EPP. Further evidence will be found in the Old High German text Tatian; 20 out of a sample of 41 subject relative clauses have th¯ar (“there”), and it is always clause-initial. We will show that da is not possible as an expletive in contemporary German (contra Bayer & Suchsland 1997, Richards & Biberauer 2005). These three periods track the loss of an overt subject expletive in German.

expletives, German, Germanic, syntax, diachronic syntax

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On the use of passives across Germanic

co-authored with Joel Wallenberg (slides uploaded)

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that deaccented topicalization in a V2 language encodes the same information structure as passivization in a non-V2 language. We use quantitative evidence from parallel parsed corpora in order to explore the use of these syntactic options. A cursory overview of the data appears to support a parallel between V2 topicalization and passivization. However, when the data is examined in more detail, this strong and attractive hypothesis is ultimately falsified. This leaves a question: although the two constructions are not the same, it is not obvious how to distinguish between their information structures under current assumptions about IS. Therefore, we will argue that this negative result is most useful in showing where the current understanding of the syntax-information structure interface is lacking. Finally, we suggest a way that the interaction between information structural constituency and syntactic constituency may help to distinguish between these two constructions, and suggest a new line of research into the syntax-IS interface.

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Analyzing V2 triggers in Historical English

co-authored with Aaron Ecay (slides uploaded)

It is well established that pronouns can intervene between a topicalized constituent and a finite verb in Old English (OE); this has been analyzed as evidence that the verb moves only as high as T in OE matrix clauses, and that a landing site between T and Spec,CP is available to subject pronouns (cf. Pintzuk 1991). This paper considers a well known exception to this pattern, involving a class of clause-initial, “discourse-anaphoric” adverbs such as þa ‘then’, swa ‘so’ and nu ‘now’, which trigger subject/verb inversion even with pronominal subjects. Since Pintzuk (1991), the literature has generally assumed that these adverbs are a class of operators in Spec,CP, which trigger verb movement to C. However, Trips and Fuß (2009) (T&F) have proposed an alternative analysis, suggesting that personal pronouns and þa-type adverbs compete to fill Spec,TP in an OE clause. Under this analysis, subject/verb inversion occurs when þa fills Spec,TP, forcing the subject to remain lower in the clause. This is argued to be a result of the “discourse configurational” characteristic of OE; Spec,TP is not filled to satisfy an EPP in this account, but in order to license discourse- anaphoric elements. T&F argue that for both pronouns and anaphoric adverbs, interpretation “involves a variable that must be bound by (or identified with) a topical element/referent in the given discourse” (184). In this paper, we will consider these alternative analyses of þa-type adverbs, and show with quantitative and empirical evidence that the data does not support T&F’s analysis.

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