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Research
Dissertation
Verb Order in Subordinate Clauses from Early
New High German to Modern German
This dissertation investigates the change from the nearly free
relative order of verbs in subordinate clauses in Early New High German
(1350-1650) to the more fixed order of Modern Standard German. Chapter 2
presents a corpus study of nearly 3,000 subordinate clauses from 30 texts
from a broad range of dialects from the 14th to the 16th century, the most
comprehensive overview of ENHG verb clusters to date. Several factors that
influence verb order are identified: syntagm type, prefix type,
extraposition, focus, and sociolinguistic factors. Chapter 3 breaks this data
down by dialect and individual text, showing that most of these factors have
similar effects across the dialects and tracing the decline of particular
orders and favoring factors over time. Chapter 4 examines these orders in
contemporary German, concentrating on the effect of focus on verb order. A
survey with speakers of Austrian dialects and Swabian shows that although the
Standard German orders are preferred, the non-standard orders may occur under
the appropriate focus conditions. A magnitude estimation experiment
demonstrates that variation in the Standard German werden-modal-infinitive
construction is also sensitive to focus. In Chapter 5, the data from the
previous chapters are used to demonstrate that the more traditional SOV
approach to the structure of German is slightly preferable to the SVO
hypothesis and that non-SOV surface orders are derived by rightward movement.
Additionally, a principle is proposed to account for the relationship between
focus and word order: a non-normal word order indicates a marked focus
interpretation. Chapter 6 discusses the implications of this research for the
history of the German language and for language change in general.
The dissertation may be purchased
from ProQuest Dissertations. I am currently revising and expanding the
manuscript for submission as a book, with a new chapter on Middle High German
and new research on Swiss German.
Other Publications, available for download
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2009. “Syncope as the Cause of Präteritumschwund: New data from an Early New High German
corpus.” Journal of
Germanic Linguistics 21.4: 419–450. [free download] ©Society for
Germanic Linguistics
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2007. “Focus and verb order in
Early New High German: Historical and contemporary evidence”. In Roots:
Linguistics in search of its evidential base, ed. by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld,
299-318. Berlin:
de Gruyter. [free download]
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2006. “The Rise of the Suffixal Article in the Early North Germanic DP”.
Co-authored with Dorian Roehrs. In Proceedings
of the Western Conference on Linguistics 2004, ed. by Michal Temkin Martinez, Asier Alcazar,
and Roberto Mayoral Hernandez, 290-301. Fresno:
California State University.
[free download]
For a complete list of my publications, see my CV.
Research
Links
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Bonner Frühneuhochdeutsch-Korpus (Early New High German
corpus)
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Thomas Gloning's medieval German texts
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Susi Wurmbrand's verb clusters
bibliography
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Wolfgang Näser's bibliography of
German syntax
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University
of Tübingen's SFB 441:
Linguistic Data Structures
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University
of Potsdam / Humboldt University’s
SFB 632: Information Structure
(especially project
B4 on Germanic word order)
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Syntactic Atlas of German-speaking
Switzerland, University of Zurich
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Middle High German Grammar
project (Bochum site)
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GoldVarb X, a statistics program for
sociolinguistic analysis
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WebExp2
Experimental Software for psycholinguistic analysis
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