The Linguistic Review: 4 203-246
GERMAN IS CONFIGURATIONAL*
GERT WEBELHUTH
"Ob nun schon wir Deutsche uns also desto weniger zu verwundern und auch zu schaemen haben, dass unsere Grammatik
noch nicht in willkommenem Stande, so duenkt mich doch
gleichwohl, sie sei noch allzuviel davon entfernt und habe daher
eine grosse Verbesserung noetig, es sei also auch dermaleinst von
deutschgesinnten Gelehrten solche mit Nachdruck vorzunehmen
... dies wuerde zu unserem Ruhm gereichen, ändern zu den
deutschen Buechern Lust bringen und den etlichen gefassten
Wahn benehmen, als ob unsere Sprache der Regeln unfaehig
und aus dem Gebrauch fast allein erlernt werden muesste."
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
(1697)
0. Since the publication of Chomsky (1981) several papers on German have
appeared which try to give an account of word order freedom in German
along the lines of Chomsky's exposition of Japanese sentence structure in
chapter 2 of his book. Most notably, Haider (1981,1982,1985a) and Tappe
(198l)1 claim that German is to be described äs having a non-configurational base component. The notion "non-configurational language"
Stands for a language type with a certain set of proporties. Haie (1982)
claims that the following seven properties are found in several languages
with extremely free word order, for example, Warlpiri:
(1)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
rieh case marking
free word order
no NP-movement
no expletive elements
discontinuous elements
complex verb-words
PRO-drop
* I would like to thank Sabine Bergler, Hans den Besten, Sascha Felix, Roger Higgins,
Richard Kayne, Jan Koster, Angelika Kratzer, David Lebeaux, David Pesetsky, Tom Roeper,
Gisa Rauh, Henk van Riemsdijk, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, and Edwin Williams. The paper owes
a lot to Jan Koster, both to his writings and to discussions I had with him. Last but not least,
I thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. Needless to say, some of
them might not be happy with what I did with their suggestions.
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Haie then proposes that non-configurational languages are generated by the
following phrase structure nile:
(2)
S -* W*
That is, the sentence structure of these languages is constrained neither by
the familiär X' -Schema of Chomsky (1970) nor by the structural conditions
on predication noted by Williams (1980). W* in (2) Stands for a string of
concatenated words without internal structure.
Haider and Tappe don't exclude the possibility that German belongs to
the non-configurational language type rather than to the X'-type, whereas
the work of other authors, e.g. den Besten (1982, 1983), describes German
sentences according to the X' -Schema including a VP-node. This uncertainty äs to whether German is configurational or not could only arise because
on the surface German displays some of the criteria in (1), but lacks others.
For example, German does not seem to have NP-movement, äs Thiersch
(1978) noticed. On the other band, German does not display properties 5,
6, and 7, i.e. there are no discontinuous phrases in the language, German
does not have complex verb-words in the sense of Navaho or Cheyenne, nor
is it a PRO-drop language like Japanese, Warlpiri, and Cheyenne, where
not only subjects but even objects can be dropped. So German, clearly has
one of the properties of non-configurational languages but lacks three
others. The remaining criteria are more difficult to decide on, since either
there are not always clear diagnostics for whether the language has the property or not, or the German evidence is ambiguous.
The first criterion is a good case in point. Abstracting away from adnominal case, which is less important in this discussion, colloquial German
makes use of nominative, dative, and accusative case. The ad-verbal
genitive is restricted to a very small class of verbs like beschuldigen 'to accuse', anklagen 'to sue', and gedenken 'to commemorate", which are all
part of official and judicial language; in non-officiaJ, non-judicial language
the ad-verbal genitive is replaced by the dative or by prepositional phrases.
The question now is whether this case System can count äs rieh, given that
Sanskrit has eight cases, Latin six, and Finnish fifteen. English has only two
cases, German has three. Compared to the other languages named, does
German have a rieh or a poor case System?
The same problems arise with the second criterion: free word order. In
English we find sentences like
(3)
John, Bill likes
(4)
There was a man in the room
(5)
There walked into the room a man from India
(6)
He talked to John about Bill
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(7)
He talked about Bill to John
Does this make English a free-word-order language? It is true that word
order in German is even freer, but it is still highly rigid when compared to
languages like Warlpiri and Malayalam, where we can find the elements of
noun phrases scattered throughout the whole sentence, äs the following
sentence from Haie (1983) shows:
(8)
Wawirri kapi-rna panti-rni
yalumpu
kangaroo AUX spear NONPAST that
will spear that kangaroo'2
So here again, German differs slightly from English, but from a typological
point of view it is unmotivated to put German and Warlpiri into one group
äs opposed to English, rather than stressing the difference between English
and German on the one hand and languages like Warlpiri on the other.
We are left with property 4. The question wehave to ask is "Does German
have expletive elements or not?" The answer to this question is difficult,
since we find sentences like (9), (10), and (II): 3
(9)
Gestern wurde getanzt
yesterday was danced
Teople were dancing yesterday'
(10)
Ich glaube, dass es wichtig ist, dass Hans mitkommt
I believe that it important is that Hans come along
(11)
weil
es scheint, dass S
because it seems that S
The first sentence does not contain any overt expletive element, but the second one does, at least if we assume that the // in the following English
sentence is an expletive element:
(12)
It is true that Bill was in Paris
It is thus unclear whether German makes use of expletives in the sense of
property 4 or not.
To sum up, of the seven properties attributed to non-configurational
languages, German clearly lacks three and has one. The remaining three are
open for debate, depending on where the borderline is drawn between free
word order and rigid word order and between a rigid case System and a rieh
one; in addition, it is not clear whether German has expletive elements in
the sense of property 7. Given that German is a language somewhere in between the prototypical non-configuratiooial and
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tional languages, there are two approaches to a description of German:
either one treats it äs belonging to the class of configurational languages and
adds an explanation for its non-configurational property, or one does it the
other way round. As we mentioned at the beginning, Haider tries the latter
approach. Furthermore, Kratzer (1984) Claims that German does not have
a VP (in finite sentences) and Tappe (1981) gives arguments to the same
effect.
At this point it is necessary to add a comment on the notion non-configurationality. Let us call a language that has most or all of the properties
in (1) strongly non-configurational. German is certainly not strongly nonconfigurational in this sense, although the adherents of the opposite view
do not really point this out clearly. Haider (1985a), for example, fails to
mention that German displays only one of the seven diagnostics clearly.
Furthermore, in practice the adherents of the non-configurationality claim
do in fact use NP, AP, and PP constituents in their analyses of German
(Kratzer even uses VP-nodes in non-finite sentences), which makes their
analyses of German strikingly different from the W* approach of Haie to
Warlpiri. In this sense, the adherents of the claim that German is not configurational are not really trying to defend the strong non-configurationality claim for German, rather, each of them is defending a claim which would
make German what I would like to call weakly non-configurational, i.e.
German does not have a VP-node, although it does have NPs, APs and PPs.
This paper tests the validity of several arguments that have been brought
forward for this claim. The goal of the paper is to show that the description
of German in non-configurational terms is unmotivated and that the arguments taken to support the claim are incorrect. We present a contrasting
analysis of German sentence structure in purely configurational terms,
which is more successful and precise.
Section l of the paper presents a purely configurational analysis of German with a discussion of certain predictions made by the theory. Section 2
deals with the arguments that I know to have been given for a non-configurational analysis pf German sentence structure in the literature. The
final section gives some concluding remarks.
1. GERMAN SENTENCE STRUCTURE
It is noted frequently in the literature on German that the word order within
the sentence and in particular within the verb phrase is freer than in English.
Since English is a prototypical configurational language, the following conclusion is often drawn by comparing English and German:
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(13)
"In order to capture the word order facts [of German] it is neither
necessary nor advantageous to assume the existence of a VP-constituent".
(Haider (1982)
In particular, the fact that the subject of the sentence in some cases unquestionably occurs between the verb and some of its objects, äs in (14), is taken
to be unexplainable within a configurational framework that assumes the
existence of a VP.
(14)
weil [dem Mann ein Buch geschenkt wurde]
bec. the man a book given
was
dat
nom
'because a book was given to the man'
I will now give an overview of a theory of German sentence structure that
assumes a VP-node and correctly predicts when the subject of a sentence
should appear in the VP and where in the VP it shouid appear. I will elaborate the theory in the next section, where I discuss the arguments that
have been given for the lack of a VP-node in German.
Every theory of German sentence structure has to account for the following facts:
(15)
a.
the external argument of the verb in the sense of Williams (1981)
is the leftmost argument of the verb in the unmarked word
order of a sentence4
b. German does not have NP-movement, hence subjects of passive
sentences appear in direct object position and there is no overt
raising to subject
c. verbal complements and adjuncts may be freely intermingled
within the VP
d. the internal arguments of a verb can occur in every order, but
the native Speaker accepts one order äs unmarked and the other
Orders äs contextually marked
e. the external argument can permute with one of the objects fairly
easily if the denotation of the external argument is inanimate;
if it's animate, the resulting structures are extremely marked
f. quantified external arguments can easily follow internal arguments
Instead of accepting the idea that word order freedom in the surface structure of a language has to be mirrored by loose constraints on the syntactic
representation of the language, I will try to explain the fact that certain subjects of German can occur in the VP in purely configurational terms,
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making crucial use of the theory of abstract Case.
That only subjects of passive and ergative verbs5 occur within the VP in
the unmarked word order suggests that German does not have NP-movement. Note, for example, the active counterpart of the passive sentence (14):
(16)
weil man [dem Mann ein Buch geschenkt hat]
bec. one the man a book given
has
nom
dat
acc
German therefore has to differ from English in that the trigger of NPmovement does not work for some reason. This trigger in the Standard account is taken to be 0-theory via the Case-filter, which demands that a noun
phrase be Case-marked to be visible for 0-role assignment.6 We can therefore make correct predictions about the unmarked position of the subject
in German if exteraal arguments occupy the [NP, S] position, but internal
arguments (among them passive and ergative subjects) are Case-marked in
situ. I want to relate the Case-assignment difference between English and
German to another salient word order difference between the two languages: in English, complements of the verb and adjuncts may not be intermingled, while in German the verb can be, and in some cases is preferred
to be, separated from its complements by sentence adverbs, negation, and
the like:
(17)
*John gave yesterday a book to Bill
(18)
Hans hat Maria das Buch gestern gegeben
Hans has Maria the book yesterday given
nom
dat
acc
I take elements which are not selected by the verb to be modifiers of
INFL,1 since they have to be licenced in order to occur in a sentence, according to the principle of Füll Interpretation (see Chomsky (1986)).8 From the
facts in (17) and (18) it follows that INFL must occur in different structural
positions in English and German. In English it must be outside the VP, since
INFL-modifiers may not occur within the VP. In German, however, INFL
must be inside the VP, since its modifiers can be freely intermingled with
the complements of the verb. I therefore assume the following sentence
structure for German:9
(19)
INFL
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Sentence structure (19) will make the following predictions for the sentence
structure of German:
(20)
a.
b.
c.
external arguments of the verb are the leftmost argument of the
verb in the unmarked word order of a sentence, because of the
conditions on predication (see Williams 1980) [= (15a)]
German does not have NP-movement in passive and ergative
sentences, since the noun phrase in direct object position will te
Case-marked in situ, since it is governed by INFL in its DSposition [= (15b)]
verbal complements and INFL-complements may be freely
intermingled, since the government domains of V and INFL
overlap [ = (
At this point we have to add an assumption about nominative Case
assignment . We adhere to the Standard assumption of the theory of Government and Binding that nominative Case is assigned by INFL. Since we claim
that INFL is in the VP underlyingly, it cannot Case-mark the external argument from this position, since it doesn't govern it due to the intervening VPbarrier. With Koopman (1983) and Platzack (1983), we assume that INFL
and some verb (making up a finite verb) move out of the VP into the presubject position, governing the external argument and assigning Case to it.
This movement will leave a trace, so that both the trace and the moved complex are Case assigners. The trace within the VP is motivated independently
by the ECP, for, if the verb did not leave a trace behind, then objects would
not be extractable from the VP, since their empty categories would violate
the ECP.
(15d) is explained if German does not have the requirement of adjacency
on Case assignment, and furthermore, if the internal arguments of the verb
are unordered. The principle of Füll Interpretation allows all Orders of the
internal arguments to be base-generated, äs long äs each complement is properly licenced, i.e. Case- and 0-licenced. Both of these elements depend on
government when internal arguments are involved. But since the verb
governs everything within the VP, it can Case- and 0-licence every complement, if it contains the relevant Case- and 0-features. The markedness value
cannot be a syntactic phenomenon, äs is witnessed by Lenerz's observation
that certain highly marked sentences become acceptable, if one makes use
of double contrastive stress:
(21)
*Er hat ein Buch seinem VATER geschenkt
he has a book his
father given
acc
dat
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(22)
Er hat ein BUCH seinem VATER und eine VASE seiner MUTTER
he has a book his
father and a vase his mother
gegeben
given
'He gave a book to his father and a vase to his mother'
The markedness values thus will have to be predicted by a pragmatic theory
rather than a syntactic one. Such a theory is given in Webelhuth (1985c).
(15e) and (160 we explain by invoking a stylistic rule, specific to quantified
and non-quantified subjects respectively.10 This rule will Chomsky-adjoin
constituents to the S-node, e.g. it will prepose an object to the pre-subject
Position and can apply to its own Output. We call the rule stylistic, because
it is not required in Order for the Output structure to be grammatical. Nevertheless, we believe that the rule does not apply in PF, but applies in the syntax. The preposed element will bind an empty category and this A' -relationship is subject to the universal conditions governing such relations. The effect
of the stylistic fronting rule can be shown with the following facts.
/. As is well known, German allows only one constituent to precede the
finite verb in main clauses. If a non-finite verb is moved into this position,
it may not take its external argument without the internal arguments, even
if a stylistic order is possible where in the non-topicalized form the external
argument intervenes between an internal argument and the verb, äs in (23):
(23)
weil dem Mann der Junge geholfen hat
bec. the man the boy helped has
dat
nom
(24)
[dem Mann geholfen] hat der Junge
dat
V
(25)
*[der Junge geholfen] hat dem Mann
nom
V
These facts (discussed for the first time by Craig Thiersch, see Thiersch
1982, 1985) show that German does have a structural asymmetry between
the external argument of the verb and the internal arguments. Otherwise it
would be unexplainable why (24) is good and (25) is bad. In addition, there
cannot be a prohibition against subjects in TOP together with the verb, since
passive and ergative subjects may appear there with their governing verb:
(26)
[Zwei Maenner erschossen] wurden waehrend des Wochenendes
two men
shot
were during the weckend
nom
Vnn
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(27)
[Ein Unfall passiert] ist hier schon lange
nicht mehr
an accident happened has here for a long time not more
nom
Vfin
*No accident has happened here for a long time'
//. Quantified external arguments following one of the internal arguments
of the verb behave with respect to the Binding Theory äs if they were in the
[NP, S] position. In particular, we find a subject-object asymmetry with
respect to weak crossover:11
(28)
*weil seinei Eltern jedenii
vertrauen
bec. his parents everybody trust
nom
dat
(29)
*weil seinei Eltern jedeni
moegen
bec. his parents everybody like
nom
acc
With a nominative quantifier following an internal argument of the verb we
do not find ungrammaticality, rather the possessive pronoun can be bound
by the quantifier:
(30)
weil seineni Eltern jeden
vertraut
bec. his
parents everybody trusts
dat
nom
(31)
weil seinej Eltern jeden
verehrt
bec. his parents everybody honours
acc
nom
We find the same subject-object asymmetry when investigating the interpretive possibilities of a focused phrase, analogous to the English example:
(32)
*Hisi mother loves JOHNj
As is well known, the focused object NP and the pronoun to the left cannot
be coreferential. We find the same fact in German:
(33)
*weil seinei Eltern PETERj moegen und nicht Hans
bec. his parents PETER like
and not Hans
nom
acc
But, interestingly enough we find that the same order of elements does not
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lead to an ungrammatical sentence if the focused phrase is a postponed subject following one of the internal arguments:
(34)
weil seinei Schuhe PETERi vergessen hatte und nicht Hans
bec. his shoes PETER forgotten had and not Hans
acc
nom
In (30), (31), and (34) we see something like an anti-crossover effect. This
asymmetry along the lines of internal vs. external argument would be unexplainable if the subject in those cases were on the same structural level äs
the internal arguments of the verb, i.e., if German did not have a VP, but
both the subject and the objects were daughters of S.12 I will refer to the
paradigms just given äs "Binding Theory facts" in section 2, where I will
show that no non-configurational theory can explain those facts.
2. ARGUMENTS FOR A NON-CONFIGURATIONAL BASE-COMPONENT OF
GERMAN
In this section I will review several arguments that have been given in the
literature for a non-configurational base-component or for the non-existence of a VP-node in German. I will group some of them together, since
several arguments fall into one of the following categories:
(35)
a.
b.
c.
construction-based arguments
arguments contrasting English and German
theory-internal arguments
From the nature of current Hnguistic theory it follows that one cannot really
separate construction-based arguments from theory-internal arguments,
since every analysis is made with respect to a certain set of theoretical
premisses. In this sense the classification in (35) is not supposed to be
analytical but rather expository. I will discuss the arguments in the order
specified above.
2.1. Construction-based arguments for non-configurationality
Haider (1982,13) gives an interesting set of facts from German on the basis
of which he arrives at the conclusion that German sentences lack the syntactic
category VP. The argument goes äs follows. Topicalization facts show that
there cannot be any configucational structure within the VP, since from the
underlying structure (36) we can derive the topicalized forms (37) and (38):
(36)
weil er doch wohl einen Kuchen backen koennen wird
bec. he presumably a
cake
bake can
will
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(37)
[einen Kuchen backen] wird er doch wohl koennen
(38)
[backen koennen] wird er doch wohl diesen Kuchen
Under the configurational account it is impossible for both the topicalized
parts in (37) and (38) to be a constituent. Hence the German sentence does
not have any structure whatsoever and it is LF-constituency that determines
the grammaticality of the sentence.
How strong is this argument? Let us go into the details. First of all, it is
unclear what an "LE-constituent" is. Why, for example, do a verb and a
modal (äs in (38) above) form an LF-constituent, but a verb and its external
argument do not, since they cannot be fronted together without the internal
arguments? No evidence is given that this notion of LF-constituency is needed elsewhere in the grammar, and it is not clear how it is determined. Furthermore, an adjective can be in the TOP-position with its specifier, leaving
behind the complement of the adjective:
(39)
[ungeheuer stolz] i waren sie auf ihre Kinder [e]i
very
proud were they of their children
Other evidence that the LF-constituent theory is incorrect comes from the
Position of the negation. The negative particle nicht may not occur together
with the verb projection in TOP if it is a verb phrase negation, although in
the non-topicalized form it occurs in the middle of the complex:
(40)
weil Hans [[das Buch nicht gelesen] hat]
bec. Hans the book not read
has
(41)
*[das Buch nicht gelesen] hat Hans
(42)
[das Buch gelesen] hat Hans nicht
If, however, the negation negates not the whole VP but a subconstituent of
it, then it may front together with this constituent.13 Even if there were no
VP, why should the negation form an LF-constituent with some constituents but not with a verb and its complements, although exactly this constituent is negated, for example in (42)? The LF-constituent theory therefore
will not work. I thus propose the following: only one syntactic constituent
can occur in TOP.14 This constituent is base-generated there and is
anaphorically related to a position in the VP. Whether a sequence of
categories forms a well-formed constituent with respect to TOP is determined by the principle of Füll Interprettation of Chomsky (1986). Hence,
if a head occurs in TOP, then it may only take its complements, but
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no other elements, for they could not be licenced and the principle of Füll
Interpretation is violated. Hence (37) and (39) are good, since the head
licences complements and specifiers. In (38) the verb backen takes the modifying modal, which is OK; i.e. we claim that (38) has the same modifiermodifiee structure äs (39), although in different order. (41) is out, since the
verb cannot licence the INFL-modifier nicht, which has to be left back in
the VP, where it can be licenced by its head äs in (42). The relevant evidence
for our theory and against the LF-constituency theory can be found in the
following sentences, which differ minimally from the ones discussed above:
(37')
[einen Kuchen backen], das wird er doch wohl koennen
(38')
[backen koennen], das wird er doch wohl diesen Kuchen
(42')
[das Buch gelesen], das hat Hans nicht
As the reader can easily see, the only dif ference between these sentences and
the Originals above is a pronoun after the topicalized constituent. This
shows that the topicalized constituents are dislocated and that they are
represented by a d-pronoun in the sentence. Since these sentences have to
be generated anyway in the grammar, the constituency in the TOP-position
is independent of the constituency of the verb phrase, since it is the anaphoric pronoun which was generated inside the VP and then moved into
COMP. All that is left to explain then is the fact that the pronoun can be
left out, äs we can see in the original sentences. This we can Attribute to
pronoun-drop in TOP-position in German, äs discussed by Huang (1984)
and ROSS (1982):
(43)
e hab ich schon gesehen
e have I already seen
have already seen it'
(43) shows that pronouns in TOP-position whose referent can be taken from
the discourse can be dropped in German. It is to be expected, then, that the
pronouns in the sentences (37)-(38) may be dropped, since they are
anaphoric to left-dislocated elements and thus recoverable. We thus assume
that (37), (38), and (42) are exactly parallel in structure to (37'), (38'), and
(42') respectively, with the minimal dif ference that in the first sentences, äs
in (43), the pronoun in COMP has deleted.15 The properties of the TOPposition thus find a fairly simple explanation in configurational terms.
We now turn to another argument. It is claimed by Tappe (1981,1) that
the fact that the VP in German is never analyzed transformationally argues
against the existence of a VP in the language. We may reply that Tappe's
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argument doesn't really go through: that the German VP - unlike the
English VP - is not analyzed transformationally is explained by our analysis of German given in section l. Note that apart from VP-fronting and
VP-deletion there is also no evidence from transformations for the existence
of a VP in English.16 Interestingly enough, in English the VP can only be
analyzed transformationally if the inflectional element is outside of it ([...
and read the book he DID])\ this construction is impossible in German,
however, since INFL is always within the VP. Thus the whole VP cannot
move. Under our theory we thus expect that only a subpart of the VP can
be moved; one element has to be left behind, namely the element bearing
the inflection. As we will see, this is exactly the correct result, abstracting
away from sentence adverbs and the negation. Since the government domains of V and INFL overlap, we find verb complements and INFL-complements intermingled:
(44)
[V-Compl INFL-Compl V-Compl INFL V]17
Since INF1 can only be moved into the verb-second position (presumably
in COMP), where it cannot take any other elements,18 the whole VP cannot
be moved. But the verb together with its complements can appear in TOP
äs we saw above. Under these conditions we predict exactly that the verb
plus its complements, but not INFL-modifiers, can cooccur in TOP due to
the principle of Füll Interpretation. In particular, Tappe's non-configurational rule of topic formation won't work. He Claims that within S the verb
is reanalyzed with some adjacent elejnents before the whole complex moves
to TOP:
(45)
X V -» [v X V]
This rule will incorrectly predict that the verb may take its external argument
to TOP, leaving behind internal arguments, if the two are adjacent in the
sentence. That this prediction is false is shown by the sharp contrast in
grammaticality between (24) and (25). Furthermore, the Standard position
of the negation particle is before the verbal complex. Tappe's theory would
predict that the verb can be fronted together with the VP-negation,19 equally incorrect. The major weakness of the non-configurational claim comes
out clearly again: in order to account for a certain freedom of word order
in German, the defenders of this theory (especially Haider and Tappe) deny
that there exists rieh phrase structure within the sentence, but are then
forced to ad hoc decisions to account for the many configurational aspects
of the language.
From the discussion above we can conclude that there are no construction-based arguments for a non-conifigurational base-component of
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2.2. Arguments for non-configurationality on the basis of
between English and German
differences
Haider (1982,19) Claims that German does not have the equivalent of
English ECM-passives:
(46)
Johni was believed [s [e]i to have been shot]
Therefore, German passive differs from English passive in that it does not
apply blindly to every noun phrase following a passive verb that cannot get
Case. Since this is a reflex of structural properties, Haider argues, English
is configurational but German is not.
Replying to this, we admit that it is correct that the passive sentence given
is ungrammatical in German:
(47)
*Peter wurde erschossen gewesen zu werden geglaubt
Peter was shot
been
to be
believed
Teter was believed to have been shot'
But the active sentence is already ungrammatical:
(48)
*Man hatte Hans Peter zu erschiessen geglaubt
one had Hans Peter to shoot
believed
'The people believed Hans to shoot Peter*
Passives of perception verbs in German are äs bad äs they are in English:
(49)
(50)
I saw John dance
vs. Ich sah Hans tanzen
*John was seen dance
vs. ?*Hans wurde tanzen gesehen
Only in English is (51) grammatical.
(51)
John was seen coming
Since German does not have a verbal present participle like the one used in
(51), this sentence cannot be expressed for independent reasons. Therefore,
the claim made above argues, if anything, for the similarity of English and
German and not for a difference between the two languages: a verb taking
a bare non-flnite complement cannot be passivized.20
There exists a well-known difference between English and German with
respect to extraction possibilities from tensed sentences. On the basis of this
difference, both Haider and Kratzer construe an argument for the lack of a
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VP-constituent in German. German does not have a subject-object asymmetry with respect to long extraction. In some dialects, extraction of both
subjects and objects is possible; in other dialects neither of them can be extracted out of a finite sentence. This shows that the verb has to properly
govern both the subject and the object. Hence German cannot have a VP,
for this node would block proper government of the subject by the verb.
In response I would like to question the force of this argument: if the lack
of a subject-object asymmetry with respect to extraction were an indicator
of the lack of a VP, then clearly configurational languages like Swedish or
Icelandic would have to lack a VP. Extractability cannot simply be due to
the existence of a VP-node, since, äs Engdahl (1984) shows for Swedish, extraction is dependent on the lexicalization of the COMP-node. Some complementizers in Swedish allow extraction; others block it. The fact that the
Germanic verb-second languages do not display clear subject-object asymmetries, whereas English does display such an asymmetry, strongly suggests
that an answer to the extractability problem lies in the structure of COMP
rather than in the projection of the verb. Within this larger perspective i.e. in a comparison of Swedish, English, German, and Dutch - an extraction theory in terms of non-configurationality seems rather unappealing. It
seems to me that a more convincing solution to the problem at hand can be
found once the role that COMP plays äs a landing site in the verb-second
languages has been clarified.
At the Salzburg Summer School in 1985, Taraldsen, following Engdahl
(1984), Pesetsky (1978), and Tomaselli (1985), proposed that COMP can
count äs a governor for the Connectedness Condition of Kayne (1983). If
we make the assumption that the landing site of productive verb movement
in the Germanic and Romance languages qualifies äs a governor with
respect to the subject position (whereas it doesn't in non-verb-movement
languages like English), we assimilate the extraction domain S ; of the movement languages ([s- X NP ...]) to the VP-domain in English ([VP X NP
...]). This explains a much wider array of data than the theory which is
based on the presence or absence of VP in a language.
We now turn to two more arguments involving a comparison of English
and German. First, a very short claim: German does not have an obligatory
subject position, whereas English does (Haider 1982,22). Confronted with
this claim, I believe it is fair to ask the following question: why should the
existence of a VP influence the existence or absence of a subject position?
Under those assumptions SVO-languages like Icelandic (see Andrews 1982)
and Swedish (see Platzack 1979) should lack a VP, since in these languages
overt subjects may also be lacking. Another comparative claim regarding
German and Dutch is also easily refutable: it is incorrect for Haider (1985a)
to claim that only German but not Dutch (which according to him has a VP)
has sentences without overt subjects. BeHow I first give a German sentence
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without an overt subject, then a Dutch <one, without
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(52)
weil [e] mich friert
bec.
me freezes
'because I am cold'
(53)
Duidelijk is [e] geweest, dat hij komt
clear
has been
that he comes
'It was clear that he would come'
Thus, once more, in a broader perspective it becomes obvious that nonconfigurationality is not responsible for non-obligatory subjects either. A
more interesting idea would be to link the property under debate to the extractability properties and the verb-second properties of the languages
discussed. This idea would be more appealing, since it would cluster these
properties together; whereas a solution in terms of verb projections would
contrast German with English, Swedish, and Icelandic, which seems just the
wrong grouping.
The following is another argument comparing English to German. Haider
(1982,30) notes that German and English behave differently with respect to
pied-piping. In German whole sentences can be pied-piped with a relative
pronoun, in English only a VP can. For Haider this is due to the fact that
in English the first maximal projection dominating a relative pronoun in DS
is the VP; in German in the absence of a VP-node it would be S. This could
be explained if the relative pronoun takes only the first maximal projection
with it to its landing site.
As a counterclaim, we note that neither in English nor in German is it correct that always the first and only the first maximal projection is pied-piped
with a relative pronoun. Note the following case of S'-pied-piping in
English (the example is from one of the reviewers):21
(54)
There goes a man [PRO to leave the party with whom]i she would
never hesitate [e]j
Furthermore, äs in German, it is incorrect that only the first maximal projection dominating a relative pronoun can be pied-piped in English:22
(55)
a book [the height [PP of the lettering [PP on the covers [PP of
which]]]]
In German, for example, a relative pronoun within a PP can pied-pipe both
the PP and the S' (äs in (56)), and even worse for the claim above, if the
PP itself is contained within an AP, then still the whole S' may pied-pipe,
äs in (57):
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(56)
der Mann [s< [PP mit dem ] nach Frankreich zu fahren], ich
the man
with whom to France
to go
I
vorhatte
planned
(57)
Forscher [s< [AP [PP auf die] stolz] zu sein] ich jedem
researchers
of which proud to be I everybody
empfehle
recommend
It is thus reasonable to doubt that pied-piping is in any relevant sense related
to the VP-node.
We turn to the claim by Haider that German - unlike Dutch, for example
— has subject idioms, i.e. idiomatic expressions one part of which is
represented by the subject of the verb. We simply note that Haider's claim
is factually false, for both German and Dutch have such idioms, s can be
seen even from word-for-word translations:
(58)
mir fiel ein Stein vom Herz
me feil a stone from the heart
º am relieved'
(59)
mir rutschte das Herz in die Hose
me slided the heart in the trousers
º got scared'
(60)
wo
drueckt dich der Schuh?
where presses you the shoe
'what's your problem?'
Corresponding Dutch examples follow:23
(61)
er is mij een steen van het hart gevallen
(= (58))
(62)
hem is de moed in de schoenen gezonken (= (59))
(63)
waar wringt hem de schoen?
(= (60))
If anything, then, the argument backfires.
The next argument is related to the syntax of pronouns. Haider (1985a)
Claims that object pronouns in Dutch can never appear before the subject
Position, whereas in German they can. This he attributes to the descriptive
generalization that pronouns in both lamguages appear at the left V-max
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boundary, which he takes to be VP in Dutch and S in Germ an.
We note again that the factual claim is false. The following sentence from
Dutch (from a lecture by Jan Koster at the Salzburg Summer School in 1985)
shows that pronouns can also precede the subject in Dutch, provided the
subject is indefinite:
(64)
dat hem nevelen omhulden
that him fogs
surrounded
Even if the descriptive generalization given is incorrect, it still has to be explained why it is more unusual to front object pronouns in Dutch than in
German. Since we know that no black-and-white syntactic rule is involved,
we note the following differences between the pronoun paradigms in German and Dutch:
Dutch: 'k
je
ie
ze
het
we
je
ze
me
je
'm
ze
het
—
je
ze
German: ich
du
er
sie
es
wir
ihr
sie
mich
dich
ihn
sie
es
uns
euch
sie
mir
dir
ihm
ihr
ihm
uns
euch
ihnen
Note that in five out of eight cases, it is impossible to teil the difference between the subject and the object form of the pronoun in Dutch, but that in
German such differences are much more clearly marked. Of course, additional problems arise from the fact that in Dutch füll noun phrases are also
indistinguishable with respect to subject and object case, whereas in German they are usually distinguishable. It follows quite clearly that Dutch
must make use of word order in order to encode grammatical relations. That
this is the correct approach rather than Haider's descriptive generalization
is suggested by the fact that German word order also becomes more rigid
in exactly those instances where the case-endings do not reflect the grammatical relations any more, e.g. in the case of case syncretism. Thus, note
the following type of sentence, which is often claimed to be unambiguous
by traditional grammars of German, allowing only the Interpretation where
the pronoun is the subject of the sentence:
(65)
weil sie
Maria angerufen hat
bec. she/her Maria called
has
Hoehle (1982) Claims that the sentence is in fact ambiguous (we agree), but
the fact that such a discussion has been going on in the literature for several
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years now proves our point nicely, namely the fact that languages will make
use of scrambling rules only to the extent that the communicative purpose
of the sentences derived is not diminished by unwanted ambiguities.
We now turn to another argument relating to subjects. Note the following
English, Dutch, and German sentences, which all have the same meaning:
(66)
that there arrived a man
(67)
dat
(68)
dass
er
een man aankwam
ein Mann ankam
Haider now Claims that the Dutch and English sentences need an expletive
subject in this construction, because
"there must occur an expletive element if no other element can occupy
the structural subject position outside the VP. If it remains empty, ECP
is violated."
(Haider 1985a, 50)
In German the expletive subject does not show up, because the language
doesn't have a VP and therefore no obligatory subject position.
There are several ways to show that the argument is incorrect, i.e. that
it does not show what it is supposed to show. One way is to show that the
argument is inconsistent with respect to the predictions the theory makes in
conjunction with other assumptions of Haider's. Haider's claim is not that
all instances of er filling the subject position in Dutch are required by the
ECP, for it is easy to show that the subject position in Dutch is properly
governed and the er is not necessary to prevent a violation of the ECP. Note
the following Quotation from Koopman (1983,203):
"There are cases, however, in which extraction from subject position
seems to be possible (äs indicated by the absence of er). This seems to hold
for all Dutch dialects."
Koopman gives the following examples of properly governed subjects in
Dutch:
(69)
Wiei denk je dat [e]i hem gisteren gezien heeft
who think you that [e] him yesterday seen has
'Who do you think (that) saw hiim yesterday'
(70)
Wiei denk je dat [e]i dat broodje opgegeten heeft
who think you that
that bread eaten
has
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'Who do you think (that) ate the bread'
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(69)-(70) and the phenomenon illustrated by them show that so far
Haider's theory also does not account for the existence of the er in the Dutch
presentation construction in (67). Since the subject position is properly
governed, äs shown in (69) and (70), the ECP cannot be responsible for the
obligatory occurrence of er in sentences like (67).
As a reaction to this fact, Haider proposed that the er in (67) is inserted
not because of the ECP, but rather because otherwise the empty category
in subject position would be Case-marked. We will now refute this argument that Case-theory requires the er in Dutch. This is rather easy to do,
for note that in the following two sentences the subject position doesn't have
any Case anyway, since the nominative case shows up on the noun phrase
in direct object position:
(71)
dat er [vp een man aankwam]
that there a man arrived
nom
(72)
dat er hier [vp ongelukken gebeurd zijn]
that here
accidents happened have
nom
'that accidents have happened' here
We can thus conclude that Haider's theory predicts that no er is necessary
in these sentences, since the subject position is both properly governed and
Case-less.
Further evidence against the claim that Case theory plays a role comes
from sentences like the following one in English:
(73)
As was suggested to me by John, it is too late to go out
Here the first subject position is protected by the adverb äs. Haider's theory
makes the prediction that the analogous German sentence will not need such
a protective adverb, since there is no subject position to protect. This prediction is false, since the German sentence also obligatorily requires an adverb:
(74)
*(Wie) [e] mir mitgeteilt wurde, ist es zu spaet um zu gehen
äs
me told
was
is it too late
to go
'As I am told, it is too late to go'
The argument is thus empirically inadequate.
Another one of Haider's arguments depends on proper government. In
German there exists a type of sentence which is absent in Dutch:
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(75)
Das ist ein Buch, das zu lesen ich mir vorgenommen habe
this is a book that to read I me planned
have
This is a book which I have planned to read'
There are two analyses of this sentence type in the literature, one in van
Riemsdijk (1983) and one in Haider (1985b). Van Riemsdijk Claims that the
object sentence in (75) is pied-piped into the COMP of the relative clause
by the relative pronoun. Haider, on the contrary, assumes that only the
relative pronoun is in the COMP of the relative clause, whereas the object
sentence has been fronted to the first position under S in the relative clause.
Haider's argument goes äs follows: the construction is possible in German,
because the language does not have a VP and the fronted object sentence
is properly governed by the verb, hence extraction out of this clause is allowed by the Condition on Extraction Domains (CED) of Huang (1982). The
construction is ungrammatical in English and Dutch, since there the fronted
object sentence is ungoverned and hence extraction is impossible. Haider
thus attributes the following structure to sentence (75):
PRO
[e]j
zu lesen ich mir vorgenommen
habe
Van Riemsdijk would assume that the sentence has the following structure:
NP
[e],
zu lesen
Haider (1985b) rejects such a structure (correctly, I believe), because it
posits a sentence type that German nOrmally lacks, namely infinitival
relative clauses:
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(78)
*Ich weiss nicht [s> when [s PRO zu treffen]]
I know not
who
to meet
don't know who to meet'
But the non-finite sentence in the COMP-node of the relative clause does
in fact have the structure of the embedded sentence in (78). From this
Haider concludes that the fronted sentence in fact does not move into
COMP but stays outside COMP, and that the relative pronoun is extracted
from the sentence. In his paper Haider was unable to produce evidence for
this claim. All he could show was that object sentences in German can be
fronted to the presubject position, without extraction taking place, which
had already been mentioned in fn. 5 of van Riemsdijk's paper. But this, of
course, does not show that extraction is really taking place from this Position. Unless it can be shown that the relative pronoun has really left the
fronted sentence, one cannot use these structures äs an argument for
anything. In particular, the van Riemsdijk analysis can be maintained if one
finds a structure for the internal sentence which does not posit a nonexisting clause structure for German.
I will therefore try to show that there is evidence for van Riemsdijk's
claim that the fronted sentence is really pied-piped into COMP, rather than
being "parked" outside of it, and that an analysis of the structure is possible
which does not posit a non-existing structure for German. Concerning the
first issue, compare the following sentences:
(79)
weil Hans wahrscheinlich versuchen wird, [s< PRO zu kommen]
bec. Hans probably
try
will
to come
'because Hans will probably try to come'
(80)
*weil Hans versuchen wird, [s> PRO wahrscheinlich zu kommen]
bec. Hans try
will
probably
to come
'because Hans will try to probably come'
The sentences show that the sentence adverb wahrscheinlich 'probably'
must have wide scope with respect to the main verb, (Koster 1984 makes use
of this test for a similar purpose.) This is impossible in the second sentence,
since here the adverb is embedded in the subordinate clause, so that it cannot have scope over the main clause. Note now that the adverb can in fact
appear in front of the fronted object clause in (81):
(81)
weil wahrscheinlich [dieses Buch zu lesen nur derjenige probieren
bec. probably
this book to read only he
try
wird, der sich dafuer interessiert
will who refl for-that interests
to you
University
Arizona
'because only he who is interested Brought
in it will
try by
to | read
thisofbook'
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That the sentence adverb can have scope over the matrix clause shows that
it commands the main verb. Note that these facts give us a nice way of
testing whether the whole sentence is pied-piped into the COMP-node of the
relative clause or whether only the relative pronoun moves there. For if the
relative pronoun moves alone, then in a sentence like (81) it will simply move
around the adverb, leaving behind the rest of the sentence. Note now that
the adverb would still have scope over the matrix clause, since it is not
embedded in the subordinate clause. The sentence would consist of the
following string of words:
(82)
das Buch, das, wahrscheinlich [e]i zu lesen niemand VP
the book that probably
to read nobody
According to Haider's theory, this sentence should be grammatical, since
the adverb is still in the matrix clause, äs in (79). Van Riemsdijk's theory
makes just the opposite prediction, since in his theory the whole sentence
has been moved to COMP. According to this theory, das wahrscheinlich zu
lesen has to be a clause and the overall sentence should be ungrammatical,
just äs (80), since the modal adverb does not have scope over the matrix
clause. Indeed, this latter prediction is borne out, since the sentence type in
(82) is in fact äs bad äs the sentence in (80) and cannot have the Interpretation of the sentence in (81):
(83)
*das Buch das wahrscheinlich zu lesen niemand versuchen wird
'the book which nobody will try to probably read'
Since Haider could not present any evidence for the claim that the fronted
sentence is "parked" outside COMP, the evidence we have just given is all
there is. These facts clearly favor the van Riemsdijk analysis over Haider's
claim. Once we have established the fact that the sentence is really piedpiped into COMP, we have to find a way for the relative pronoun to front
without moving into the COMP of the internal sentence, for such a sentence
type does not exist in German. It is fairly obvious how to achieve this result.
We know that German has a rule which Chomsky-adjoins fronted elements
to the S-node. There is no reason to assume this rule cannot operate in this
structure; rather, it is perfectly natural to assume that the rule will be able
to operate wherever its Output doesn't violate any well-formedness principle. According to this theory, (75) would have the following structure:
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Np
'ch m'r Ielk vorgenommen habe
""s
NP^-VP
PRO
NP\
[e]j
zu lesen
Together with an independent principle of German, our theory does in
fact make a prediction which favors it over Haider's theory once again. It
is a fact about German relative clauses that the relative pronoun in German
must not be separated from the head of the relative clause by more than a
preposition. This can be shown with the following sentences:
{
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
den ich kenne
mit dem ich gesprochen habe
* einen Bruder von dem ich kenne
dessen Bruder ich kenne
Note particularly the difference between the last two sentences, which show
the restriction quite strikingly. For our purposes it will be enough to formulate the following filter for German:
(86)
*[á × (Ñ) ÍÑ]
where a is the COMP of a relative clause, NP is the relative pronoun,
and X is non-null
Haider's theory now predicts that it should be possible to extract the PP
following einen Bruder out of the fronted NP in (85c), since the NP is in
fact properly governed by the verb in his theory. Subjacency will not play
a role, since such PPs can be extracted out of object NPs in German, s the
following sentence shows:
(87)
[Von wem]i hast du [NP einen Bruder [e]i] gesehen
of whom have you
a
brother
seen
The prediction is in fact incorrect, since the following sentence is entirely
ungrammatical:
(88)
*Das ist der Mann [von dem]t [NP einen Bruder [e]i]k ich [e]k
that is the man of whom
a
brother
I
gesehen habe
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Our theory makes the correct prediction though, since sentence (88) cannot
be derived by the rules given. Our System allows the whole NP einen Bruder
von dem to be moved into the COMP of the relative clause, but then the
relative pronoun can in fact not be fronted, since there is no landing site for
it. Since NPs don't have COMPs and since there is no adjunction rule for
noun phrases similar to the sentence domain, the relative pronoun must remain in situ. But then the structure violates filter (86), which was independently motivated. The difference between sentence type (75) and
sentence type (88) is thus predicted only by our theory, namely the theory
which depends on the existence of an adjunction rule to the S-node in German. Haider's theory in fact predicts that these two sentences should be on
a par, since in both cases we are extracting from a properly governed position and the CED is not violated, nor is any other independently motivated
principle violated.
Let us now return to Haider's claim that the existence of sentences like
(75) constitutes evidence for the non-existence of a VP in German, whereas
the absence of such sentences constitutes evidence for a VP in Dutch and
English. We first note that this claim is based on Haider's assumptions
about the structure of these sentences, which we have just shown to be incorrect. Once it has been shown that the sentences involve pied-piping of a
whole sentence into COMP, the existence of such sentences äs (75) depends
on the existence of S'-pied-piping. As we have already shown, German
allows an S' to pied-pipe, and so does English. Dutch does not allow a
whole S' to pied-pipe for reasons which are unknown at present, but there
does not exist any evidence to the effect that pied-piping of S"s depends on
ymax jn any way ^ f or tken one wouid expect Dutch and English to behave
alike, if one acccpts that both languages have a VP. This is not the case,
however. Whatever principle is responsible for the non-existence of S' -piedpiping in Dutch will also explain why sentences analogous to (75) are
ungrammatical in Dutch, but grammatical in German. Furthermore, it will
have to be explained why the whole sentence may pied-pipe into the COMP
of a relative clause in English, whereas the relative pronoun may not move
into COMP internal to the sentence in COMP. This fact follows neither
from Haider's theory nor from our theory. We will leave this question open,
speculating that if the relative pronoun were in the COMP of the embedded
sentence it would lose certain scope possibilities necessary for its Interpretation, in the same way that WH-words in subordinate COMPs cannot
have scope over the matrix clause.
We thus conclude that once Haider's claim is subjected to close scrutiny,
virtually no element of it can be accepted äs correct. Extraction from subject
and object clauses in relative clauses argues, if anything, for our configurational theory.
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228
ject sentences to WH-extraction äs well, claiming that this extraction is also
possible, for example in a sentence like the following:
(89)
Wenj hat [s. PRO [e]i zu kuessen dir Spass gemacht]
who has
to kiss
you fun made
'Who was it fun for you to kiss?'
For this he gives the same explanation äs for relative clause extraction: since
subject sentences and fronted object sentences are governed by the verb, and
in fact properly governed, one may extract from them in German but not
in English and Dutch.
First, we note that Haider's data are at best debatable. I personally, äs
well äs all of my German and Austrian informants, find (89) at best very
marginal, and the following sentences entirely ungrammatical:
(90)
*Wer ist dass [[e] nicht gekommen ist] Schade
who is that
not come
is pity
'It is a pity that who didn't come?'
(91)
*[Von wem] hat [PRO [e] gegruesst zu werden] dich gefreut
by whom has
greeted to be
you enjoyed
'You are happy that you were greeted by whom?'
(92)
*Wie ist [PRO ihn [e] zu nennen] eine Frechheit
what is
him to call
an impoliteness
To call him what is an impoliteness?'
In all these cases the sentences are grammatical if the WH-word is not
moved. What makes (90)-(92) bad is the WH-extraction. As I said, there
is some debate over whether all these sentences are grammatical or not. For
the sake of argument, let us assume that they are in fact marginally possible.
The value of these sentences on an absolute grammaticality scale is only of
minor importance. Let us then turn to an investigation of the relative grammaticality of various sentences types. As noted above, Haider relies on the
claim that subject sentences in German are properly governed. That explains why one can extract both relative pronouns and WH-words out of
these sentences. But note that even Haider concedes that WH-extraction out
of subject sentences is not fully grammatical. In a talk at the Salzburg Summer School in 1985, he claimed that R-extraction (relative pronouns) is
perfectly grammatical, whereas WH-extraction deserves at least one question mark. It is interesting to note that Haider's own theory does not make
this prediction: under his theory R-extraction and WH-extraction from subject sentences should have the same Status, since the same movement Operation is involved and since the subject sentences in both cases are properly
governed. So even if we assume Haider's own grammaticality judgments,
his theory makes an incorrect prediction.
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But there is an even more strikingly incorrect prediction. Extractions can
be made from subject sentences in German because they are properly
governed, according to Haider. So bis theory predicts that extraction from
subject sentences should have the same grammaticality Status äs extraction
from object sentences, since this latter class of sentences is also properly
governed by the verb. This prediction is false, äs the comparison between
the following sentences documents:
(93)
(94)
*Wen ist [S' dass [e]i nicht gekommen ist] Schade
who is
that
not come
is pity
*It is a pity that who didn't come?'
Wen glaubst du [ s > dass [e]i nicht gekommen ist]
who believe you that
not come
is
'Who do you believe hasn't come?'
For Speakers of German who can extract over a complementizer, (94) is fully
grammatical, whereas (93) is completely ungrammatical. But even for
Speakers (like me) who cannot extract over a complementizer at all, there
is still a sharp grammaticality contrast between the two sentences. The second sentence displays a normal subjacency violation, whereas the first
sentence is almost uninterpretable. Haider's theory predicts the two
sentences to be equally good, since in both cases the CED is not violated and
extraction should be possible.
All the facts taken together clearly indicate that subject sentences in
German are movement islands. That the extraction of relative pronouns
does not falsify this claim we showed above, where we claimed that the
relative pronoun is only fronted internal to its sentence, but in fact does not
leave the sentence. This kind of sentence is thus predicted by our theory to
be fully grammatical. WH-extraction should be impossible, however, since
here the WH-word visibly moves out of the sentence, thereby violating subjacency. This move, which explains all the data except one phenomenon to
which we will turn immediately, is not possible in Haider's theory, since he
assumes that relative pronouns äs well äs WH-words are in fact extracted
from the subject sentences. We have thus confronted this theory with an empirically more adequate one, which furthermore is more in accordance with
the intuitions of most native Speakers.
We now turn to a final point with respect to extraction from subject
sentences: comparative clauses. Haider notes that the following sentence is
fully grammatical in German:
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(95)
Wir haben [mehr Fluechtlingeji aufgenommen als [s/ PRO [e]i
we have more refugees
accepted
than
aufzunehmen] vernuenftig war]
to accept
reasonable was
'We have accepted more refugees than it was reasonable to accept'
This sentence is ungrammatical in Dutch and in English. Haider takes the
proper government Status of subject sentences in German to be responsible
for this difference, in analbgy to R-extraction and WH-extraction from
these clauses. We have already refuted the claim with respect to the latter
two phenomena. Now we will show that these subject sentences in comparative clauses are also movement islands. Note first that the sentence type
(95) is only grammatical if the "moved" element is a noun phrase (mehr
Fluechtlinge). If we try to extract a PP, the sentence is impossible:
(96)
"Ich habe mit mehr Maedchen\ getanzt als [PRO [e]i zu tanzen]
I have with more girls
danced than
to dance
vernuenftig war
reasonable was
I have danced with more girls than it was reasonable to dance with'
We find the same Situation with APs:
(97)
*Sie ist groesser\ als [PRO [e]j zu sein notwendig ist
she is taller
than
to be necessary is
Since only NPs allow the "extraction", we assume with Chomsky (1982)
(quoting Belletti) and Cinque (1984) that the extraction domain under discussion is in fact an absolute island to movement. That noun phrases seem
to circumvent this movement barrier relates to the existence of the pronominal element pro, which is a noun phrase and can be anaphorically
related to an element outside the movement island. An equivalent English
sentence would be the following one:
(98)
Whoi did you go to England [without PRO meeting pro\]
This sentence is not derived by moving the ííËï out of the island, but rather
by establishing a coindexation relationship between the base-generated who
and t he pro in the island. In English the pro can also be related only to NPs,
not to anything eise. If we assume the same mechanism for German comparative clauses and WH-extraction from subject sentences, then we make
exactly the correct predictions for these cases. In English the extraction
from comparative clauses will be impossible, even for NPs, since the eleBrought to you by | University of Arizona
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mentpro is subject to the Connectedness Condition of Kayne (1983) and pro
would be on a left branch in English, so that the sentence is ungrammatical.
The equivalent sentence in Dutch is out for a different reason: the source
for the "extraction" is already ungrammatical.
(99)
*Het is de vraag
of [PRO deze vluchtelingen op te nemen]
it is the question whether these refugees
to accept
een goed idee was
a good idea was
'The question is whether it was a good idea to accept these refugees'
The sentence is grammatical only if the subject sentence is extraposed; but
then it follows straightforwardly why extraction from the non-extraposed
sentence is ungrammatical: why should extraction out of the subject
sentence suspend the obligatory need for extraposition?
To sum up, Haider claimed that extraction from fronted object sentences
and from subject sentences argues for the non-existence of a VP-node in
German, in contrast to English and Dutch. We have disputed some of the
factual Claims made by Haider. The relative grammaticality judgments of
the relevant sentences follow straightforwardly if one assumes (/) that the
relative pronoun pied-pipes a whole sentence into COMP but does not leave
the internal sentence, (//) that WH-movement out of these clauses is impossible in German äs well äs in the other languages, and (///) that in comparative clauses also no movement takes place out of subject sentences.
Haider's theory makes the wrong prediction in all of these cases.
This concludes section 2.2. As at the end of section 2.1, we are justified
in claiming that no convincing arguments for the non-existence of a VPnode in German have been given so far.
2.3. Theory-internal arguments against a VP in German
The theory-internal arguments we will discuss focus on different aspects of
linguistic theory: the applicability of the principles of the theory of Government and Binding to German, simplicity criteria, etc.
The first theory-internal argument I want to discuss relates to NP-movement. Haider (1981,17) and Tappe (1981,1) argue that German does not
display NP-movement, but English does. The reason for this is supposed to
be that NP-movement is contingent on "structurally defmed positions
which are 'immunized* for Case-assignment" (Haider). This is the "lastresort" theory of movement, which claims that NP-movement will only
take place if some grammatical principle requires it to take place. Object-tosubject movement in English passives is due to the fact that the direct object
Position of a passive sentence cannot be Case-marked, since the passive verb
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does not assign accusative case and INFL cannot assign Case to an element
within the VP, since the VP blocks the govemment relation between INFL
and an NP within the VP. Therefore the object has to move into the government domain of INFL. The proponents of the non-configurational theory
now propose that NP-movement is absent in German, since German does
not have a VP-node. Thus a passive subject can be Case-marked by INFL
in situ, since there is no VP äs a barrier for the govemment relation between
Case-assigner and assignee.
In answer to this claim we, äs proponents of a configurational theory,
may note that the theory of German sentence stnicture presented in section
l of this paper accounts for the fact that NP-movement does not occur in
the language. In addition, our theory has the advantage over Haider's and
Tappe's theory that it explains why passive subjects and subjects of ergative
verbs have the same syntactic distribution äs active direct objects. In fact,
in Webelhuth (1985a), we use exactly this fact äs an argument against a lexical theory of verbal passives. A non-configurational theory with a flat
structure cannot explain without additional assumptions why, for example,
passive subjects (101), active direct objects (100), and ergative subjects 102)
may all be fronted to the main clause TOPIC-position together with a nonfinite verb while leaving behind other internal arguments, whereas subjects
of active verbs (103) may not do that:
(100)
[Ein Buch geschenkt] hat man den Kindern noch nie
a book given
has one the children never
acc
nom
dat
One has never given the children a book'
(101)
[Ein Buch geschenkt] wurde den Kindern noch nie
a
(102)
book given
was the children never
nom
dat
book was never given to the children'
[Ein Fehler unterlaufen] ist unserem Lehrer noch nie
a mistake happened is our
teacher never
nom
dat
'Never did a mistake happen to our teacher'
(103) *[Ein Junge geschickt] hat ihm einen Brief noch nie
a boy sent
has him a
letter never
nom
dat
acc
A boy has never sent him a letter'
The non-configurational theory is also unable to explain the Binding
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theory facts analyzed in section l. Our theory, which makes use of a stylistic
rule, can give a füll account of these facts. None of the theories without a
VP-node manages to do this. This includes the theory of Kratzer (1984),
which does not assume a flat structure. We will discuss this theory in some
detail below.
Now we come to a theory-internal argument with more force. As Tappe
(1981,4) notices, scrambling in German is restricted to the sentence domain.
A non-configurational approach can explain this with the following phrasestructure rule:
(104) S -> X"* VINFL
In a configurational approach this is an accident.
If Tappe's argument goes through, then the non-configurational theory
has an explanatory advantage over our theory in that our theory has to
stipulate the domain in which the stylistic rule may operate, whereas such
a stipulation is not necessary in the competing theory. But, äs is obvious
from the very formulation of the phrase-structure rule (104) above, the nonconfigurational theory does mention the scrambling domain. That this
mention of the domain is necessary does not come äs a surprise, since, for
example, the counterpart of scrambling out of an S-domain will have to be
prevented. If (104) is applied and produces the following structure:
(105) [ s N P [ s V i ] V k ]
some mirror image rule of the configurational scrambling rule will have to
prevent the NP being interpreted äs the external argument of Vi. One could
reply that the NP in (105) is OUtside the Interpretation domain of the
arguments for Vi (which is S of Vi), but such a solution is of course also
possible within the configurational theory, since the Interpretation domain
of the arguments of the verb will be the next S-node dominating it, since at
least the external argument is outside the VP-domain. But movement out
of this S-domain is of course forbidden by subjacency, so that scrambling
is restricted to the sentence domain.
The last two arguments that we will review are developed in Kratzer
(1984), which assumes that tensed sentences in German, unlike their English
counterparts, do not have a VP-node,25 since in the structure [« V-INFL]
in German INFL is "stronger" than the verb and wins the competition for
thefeaturepercolation:thusa = INFL, a' = INFL', and amax = INFLmax
= S.
According to this theory, there is no verb phrase in tensed sentences, only
projections of INFL. Therefore every order of elements within the sentence
can be generated, and in particular, the subject may appear between the
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objects of the verb. It remains unexplained in this theory why all members
of the class of external arguments follow the same word order regularities,
although all Orders should have the same Status. The VP-adverb gern 'gladly', for example, can appear in every order with the internal arguments of
the verb, but it cannot precede the external argument:
(106)
weil Maenner den Frauen den Abwasch gern
ueberlassen
bec. men
the women the dishes
gladly leave
nom
dat
acc
adv
(107)
weil Maenner den Frauen gern den Abwasch ueberlassen
nom
dat
adv
acc
(108)
weil Maenner gern den Frauen den Abwasch ueberlassen
nom adv
dat
acc
(109)
*weil gern Maenner den Frauen den Abwasch ueberlassen
adv nom
dat
acc
A much more serious problem for the analysis is represented by the anticrossover facts mentioned above. Since the theory gives up the structural
conditions on predication (which we take for granted), i.e. it deprives the
subject of its distinguished phrase structure position outside the maximal
projection of the verb, the following contrasts are unexplainable:
(110)
weil seineni Eltern ja wohl jeden
traut
bec. his
parents just
everybody trusts
int. arg.
ext. arg.
dat
nom
(111)
*weil seinei Eltern jedemi
trauen
bec. his parents everybody trust
ext. arg.
int. arg.
nom
dat
(112)
*weil seinei Eltern PETERi moegen und nicht Hans
bec. his parents PETER like
and not Hans
ext. arg. int. arg.
nom
acc
(113)
weil seinei Schuhe PETERi vergessen hat und nicht Hans
bec. his shoes PETER forgotten has and not Hans
int. arg. ext. arg.
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nom
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At this point it seems appropriate to discuss a remark by Haider (1985a)
about the weak crossover cases. Haider accepts the facts given above, but
Claims that the grammaticality judgments are in fact not due to the Bijection
Principle (i.e. the Binding theory encompassing c-command), but rather to
the claim of the mid-seventies that a pronoun cannot be coreferential to a
noun phrase that it precedes and commands (see Lasnik 1976). Evidence
that "precede and command" rather than "c-command" is the correct notion ruling out the ungrammatical sentences given above comes from the
following contrast, according to Haider:
(114)
Hans spricht mit Mariai ueber siei
Hans talks to Maria about her
(115)
*Hans spricht ueber sie* mit Mariai
Hans talks about her to Maria
Since there is no c-command between the name and the pronoun in either
case, the order of the PPs should not make a difference in the theory that
Claims that weak crossover depends on c-command. Both sentences should
thus be grammatical. The theory that Claims that weak crossover has to be
explained in terms of precede and command can make the distinction,
however, since only in the second sentence does the pronoun both precede
and command the name. To see that Haider's objection is incorrect, we
quote a sentence from Grewendorf (1984), which gives essentially the same
sentences äs above, prefacing the examples with the following: "Fuer die
folgenden Beispiele wird dabei jeweils eine normale Betonung angenommen." The important part of the sentence is normale Betonung. In the unmarked Intonation, the nuclear accent of the sentence falls on the rightmost
constituent in both (114) and (115). But if Maria in (l 15) carries the main
stress, then we get the same weak crossover violation in this sentence äs in
(l 16) *His mother likes JOHN
Therefore, the fact that (l 15) is worse than (l 14) does not distinguish the
two approaches to weak crossover. But the two theories make different
predictions for the case when the nuclear accent in the sentence does not fall
on the name. The c-command theory predicts that these sentences should
be better than the ones just discussed; the other theory predicts that the
sentences should still be bad, if the pronoun both precedes and commands
the name. It turns out that the c-command theory is the correct one, because
native Speakers of German accept sentences like the following, where the
name does not carry the nuclear accent (brought to my attention by Gisa
Rauh):
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(117)
Sie haben ihr endlich den Mantel geschenkt, den Maria sich schon
seit Jaren GEWUENSCHT hatte
They have given her the coat that Maria had been longing for for
years'
(118) Peter hat bei ihr kein Bild von Marias Vater FINDEN koennen
'Peter could not find a picture of Maria's father in her apartment'
(119)
Sie haben sich bei ihr nochmal nach Marias krankem BRUDER
erkundigt
They inquired of her about Maria's sick brother'
We see a nice minimal pair in the following two sentences, where in each
case the pronoun both precedes and commands the name. Still, there is a
sharp grammaticality difference between the two sentences, since only in the
second sentence does the pronoun c-command the name:
(120)
[NP der Angriff [PP auf ihm], der
Hansi voellig
the attack
on him which Hans completely
ueberraschte] kostete ihn das Leben
surprised
cost
him the life
'The attack on him which surprised Hans completely cost him his
life'
(121)
*[NP sehii Angriff, der
Hansj voellig
in Anspruch nahm]
his attack which Hans completely in occupation took
kostete ihn das Leben
cost
him the life
'His attack which occupied Hans completely cost him his life'
We can thus follow Haider, who gives the alternatives in his paper: either
the c-command theory of weak crossover is incorrect, or German must have
a VP. We have just shown that there is every reason to believe that the ccommand theory is correct.
This concludes our discussion of the theory-internal arguments for the
claim that German is not a configurational language. No really compelling
argument for this claim has been found. The last section of this paper will
deal with some additional considerations.
2.4. Additional considerations
Considering the discussion so far, it seems that the evidence against a nonconfigurational construal of the German base is overwhelming. Neverthe-
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less, I want to add some further considerations.
First I want to give a short discussion of a claim in Kratzer (1984). As was
already mentioned above, she Claims that only English but not German has
a VP-nbde. This difference is taken to be due to the Status of inflection in
the t wo languages. In particular, German tensed sentences are supposed to
have a "strong inflection", whereas English is said to have only weak inflection. The main argument is that a weak inflection will correlate with the existence of a VP-node, whereas a verb with a strong inflectional affix is taken
to be too weak to project its features. In this case the inflectional features
will percolate up. The result is that German non-tensed sentences and all
sentences in English have a VP (since their inflection is weak), while tensed
sentences in German do not have verbal projections at all but inflectional
projections instead. If we take the non-existence of a VP äs a necessary and
sufficient condition for non-configurationality, then Kratzer (1984) construes configurationality äs a function of the richness of verbal inflection.
A close examination of cross-linguistic facts shows that the latter claim
is untenable. It departs from the traditional functional account of free word
order, which takes the richness of nominal inflection to be responsible for
permutation possibilities. Since German has both rieh verbal and rieh
nominal inflection, and English has neither, these Claims cannot be decided
by an investigation of these t wo languages. Rather we have to look into
languages which have only one rieh inflectional System: nominal or verbal.
The languages that I have had a chance to examine under this perspective
support the traditional account over the new one:
1) In its historical development French has lost its overt case-marking
while it has not lost all of its verbal inflection. Word order in French is more
rigid than in Latin, from which it differs mainly through its lack of caseendings.
2) Navaho has an extremely rieh verbal inflection but no nominal inflection (see Haie 1983). According to Haie, the subject-object order for each
verb is entirely fixed.
3) Bengali (Gautam Sengupta, p.c.) has a system of verbal inflection
which is äs rieh äs the German system. The System of nominal inflection is
poorer than in German. We find the following rather interesting phenomenon, which can only be explained by the classical functional theory of free
word order: if subject and object of a verb are distinguishable by their caseendings, then they may be permuted by a stylistic rule; if with the same verb
we choose two nouns which cannot be distinguished on the basis of their
case-marking (i.e. the grammatical relations cannot be determined from
morphological case), then stylistic permutation is much more difficult.
4) There is also evidence against the verb-inflectional theory in languages
which have only nominal but no verbal inflectional endings. The theory
would predict that in such languages word order is frozen. The classical
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theory, on the other band, would predict that stylistic permutation is possible on functional grounds, since the encoding of grammatical relations via
case allows word order freedom. The facts we find support the classical
theory. Japanese does not have any verbal infiection, but marks grammatical relations with case-particles; word order is extremely free. The same
is true for Korean. The support for the traditional account enables us to
view it äs an essential component in the grammar of stylistic permutation
rules. These rules will produce the non-configurationality effects; nothing
eise of theoretical interest follows, at least nothing that could be used for
configurationality äs a syntactic rather than a stylistic factor in languages
like German or Dutch. (Note that Dutch - which has no nominal infiection
left at all, but some verbal infiection - is much more fixed in its word order
than German, lending further support to the classical theory of free word
order.)
3. CONCLUSION
In this paper I have discussed two non-configurationality Claims for German: (/) the claim that German is strongly non-configurational, i.e. that the
language belongs in the same typological class äs e.g. Warlpiri, and (//) the
claim that German is weakly non-configurational, i.e. the language lacks a
VP. Thefirstclaim - not seriously defended by anyone anyway - wasdiscarded on the basis of the fact that German exhibits only one out of seven
of the non-configurational properties clearly, whereas it clearly lacks three,
and in several others is more closely related to English than to the strongly
non-configurational languages.
The weak claim was attacked by showing one of three things for each of
the arguments allegedly supporting it: (/) the factual Claims about German
on which the argument is based are incorrect; (//') the argument against a VP
in German is equally applicable to English or to some other language which
has a VP; or (///) the argument doesn't show what it is supposed to show.
Furthermore, we collected facts relating to the Binding theory and the licencing properties of verbs in the German "Vorfeld", which find an explanation not in the non-configurational theories, but in the theory assuming the
existence of a VP in German. In particular, a verb is not able to licence its
external arguments in the "Vorfeld" without licencing its internal arguments, but it can licence internal arguments, äs the difference between (10)
and (l 1) shows. The difference cannot be related to Case- or Theta-theory,
since then (12) and (13) would also be deviant. Furthermore, the
subject-object asymmetry can not be due to a general prohibition against
external arguments in the "Vorfeld" either, since people who accept
sentences with preposed subjects of ergative verbs (äs in (101)) also accept
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sentences like the following, where an external argument is fronted:
(122)
[Leute getanzt] haben hier noch nie
people danced have here never
nom
'There have never danced any people here'
This sentence is possible because, unlike in (25) and (103), no internal argument is stranded, since the verb has only one argument. It follows that the
verb must have a closer structural relationship to its internal arguments than
to its external argument, since it can licence its internal arguments without
the external argument but not the other way round.
The non-configurational theories thus leave us with a complete mystery:
why are verbs unable to licence their external argument in the "Vorfeld",
if they can licence it within the sentence domain? If the verb really governed
its external argument in the sentence, one would expect it to do the same in
the "Vorfeld". Since the theories which assume that German lacks a VP
cannot explain that, they share the fate of the strong non-configurationality
theories: the description of German in (weak or strong) non-configurational
terms is unmotivated and inferior to a description in configurational terms.
NOTES
1. A reviewer notes that Tappe (in the paper mentioned) remarks that in general Haider only
makes a case for the possibility of analyzing German without a VP, not the necessity of analyzing it äs having a flat structure, and suggests that other considerations may well lead us to
suppose an articulated structure. What is relevant for our purposes is that Tappe has given
arguments for a non-configurational treatment of German, and has proposed using phrasestructure rules like (45) to generate sentences of German. We are interested in exactly those
arguments.
2. The following sentence type might suggest that German does in fact have discontinuous
phrases:
(i)
Schraubenzieher habe ich meinem Vater keinen gegeben
screwdriver
have I my
father none given
have not given a screwdriver to my father'
But there is evidence that this partitive construction is derived by WH-movement, for it is impossible to tear apart the NP keinen Schraubenzieher internal to the sentence:
(ii)
*weil ich Schraubenzieher meinem Vater keinen gegeben habe
bec. I screwdriver
my
father none given
have
'because I have not given a screwdriver to my father'
There are further restrictions on this construction, e-g. only quantifiers and certain adjectives
can be stranded by this movement, but not definite articles. It is also interesting to note that
the stranded specifier occurs in the "wrong" declension class:
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(
keinsl (strong declension)
>
*kein J (weak declension)
book have I
none
don't have a book'
f
'keins]
> Buch
keinj
don't have a book'
This is problematic for all theories claiming that the topicalized noun and the stranded quantifier form a constituent at some level of representation. What is important for us is that the
German construction is similar to preposition stranding in English and can thus be analyzed
äs a WH-movement construction. There will thus not be any discontinuous constituent, since.
the topicalized noun is related to an empty category within the sentence.
It is quite interesting to note that a reanalysis of Haie's data from Warlpiri has been given
recently by Jelinek (1984). Jelinek reduces the defming properties of what she calls W-type
non-configurational languages to the following two:
a) A predicate-AUX complex that constitutes a finite sentence, a verb, and its arguments
b) Optional, non-argumental nominals
What is interesting for us is that if Jelinek is right in making the above properties definitional
for non-configurational languages, then German doesn't even satisfy a single one of the conditions for non-configurationality, since German has neither (a) nor (b). To my knowledge, no
defender of the claim that German is non-configurational has discussed Jelinek's interesting
article.
3. By expletive elements we mean non-referential elements in an A-position, not the so-called
topic-es in constructions like
(i)
Es hat jemand meinen Geldbeutel gestohlen
it has somebody my
purse
stolen
'Somebody stole my purse'
4. By unmarked word order I mean the word order the native Speaker accepts äs most natural
in a context where none of the referents of the noun phrases involved are known to the hearer
or where all these referents are equally well known. For further details and predictions of this
theory, see Webelhuth (1985c), which also discusses the interplay between this pragmatic notion of markedness and syntactic well-formedness conditions on stylistic word Orders.
5. We use the notion "ergative verb" here in the sense of Burzio (1981) and many works
thereafter, rather than in the sense of "ergative language". The different word order properties
of active and passive sentences and their pragmatic relevance is discussed thoroughly in Lenerz
(1977). A critique of Lenerz can be found in Hoehle (1982); a discussion of Hoehle's approach
is given in Webelhuth (1985c).
6. For a detailed exposition of this theory, see Chomsky (1981), chapter 6.
7. More precisely, the adjuncts seem to be complements of the features (+ N, - V] in INFL,
since those features can also licence temporal and locative adjuncts in NPs:
(i)
(ii)
the concert last night
Kennedy airport in New York City
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The interpretive similarities between NP and INFL-modifiers are thus encoded s follows: (i)
and (iii) would get the logical representations (iv) and (v):
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
John arrived last night
3x xt evcm 3z z< time (concert ÷ & happened-at ÷ æ)
3x xt cvem 3zz< time (John arrived ÷ & happened-at ÷ æ)
8. Chomsky (1986), p. 98f:
"We might express many of these ideas by saying that there is a principle of F ll Interpretation (FI) that requires that every element of PF and LF, taken to be the Interface of
syntax (in the broad sense) with Systems of language use, must receive an appropriate Interpretation - must be licenced in the sense indicated. None can simply be disregarded. At the
level of PF, each phonetic element must be licenced by some physical Interpretation. The
word book for example has the phonetic Interpretation /buk/. It could not be represented
/fburk/, where we simply disregard /f/ and /r/; that would be possible only if there were
particular rules o r general principles deleting these elements. Similarly we cannot have
sentences of the form (88), interpreted respectively s º was in England last year', * John was
here yesterday', 'John saw Bill', 'everyone was here', simply disregarding the unlicenced
bracketed elements the man, walked, who, every:
(88) (i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
I was in England last year the man
John was here yesterday walked
Who John saw Bill
Every everyone was here"
and page 93:
"Every element that appears in a weH-formed structure must be licenced in one of a small
number of available ways. The licencing options will include among others the following.
An operator is licenced by binding a variable, from which it is not 'too distant' in a certain
well-defined abstract sense ... Every complement of a head must be s-selected by it. An element that assigns semantic roles must have recipients in appropriate syntactic positions: for
example, the verb Mt must have an (s-selected) object to receive the role of patient."
9. We take the S-node in German to be unheaded, in analogy to Taraldsen's (1984) analysis
of Swedish. The principle of F ll Interpretation only requires every tree node to be licenced,
it does not require that every node be licenced by being a member of a head projection line
in the sense of X'-theory (determiners, for example, are also not members of such a line),
although such a licencing is of course not excluded. We thus assume that the S-node in German
s in Swedish is licenced by syntactic predication in the sense of Rothstein (1983).
10. We do not really know why quantified subjects behave differently from non-quantified
ones. One possibility would be that those elements, being non-referential, can occur adjacent
to the verb without necessarily attracting the main stress of the sentence:
(i) weil unseren Nachbarn ein AUTO angefahren hat
bec. our
neighbor a car
hit
has
acc
nom
'because some car has hit our neighbor'
(ii) weil unseren Nachbarn jemand angefahren hat
bec. our
neighbor somebody hit
has
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acc
nom
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242
The fact that these elements are not referential makes them in a certain sense also indefinite.
This indeterminacy of reference is something they share with indefinite NPs, which might explain why these two classes of elements can follow objects more easily than definite subjects.
For further discussion, see Webelhuth (1985c).
11. Not everybody finds (28), (29), and (33) ungrammatical. Still, everybody I know agrees
that the intended reading in these sentences is much more difficult to get than in the control
sentences. This is exactly the theoretically interesting subject-object asymmetry we are looking
for.
12. Note that the strenger claim, namely that the external argument not only has a designated
structural relationship to the verb, but in addition is the sister of a VP-node, is difficult to
prove with theory-neutral arguments. It is only the strong universal claim that external
arguments will enter into such a relationship that makes us believe that the sister of the external
argument is VP rather than V'. Given that this latter position is the more interesting one from
an explanatory point of view and that our theory based on this position is more successful than
the theories without it, we might invoke Occam's razor and call the sister-node of the external
argument VP.
13. This is an example:
(i)
[Nicht das Buch] wollte er stehlen, sondern die Flasche
not the book wanted he steal
but
the bottle
'It wasn't the book he wanted to steal, but the bottle'
14. There exist some putative counterexamples to this claim in Engel (1977) and Hoberg
(1981). One type of example noted frequently is:
(i)
[Gestern am
Strand] hat ...
yesterday on the beach has ...
In Webelhuth (1985c) I argue that despite its appearance, am Strand m (i) is not used äs a local
adverb, but rather äs a temporal one. Sentence (i) means something along the lines of 'Yesterday, when I was on the beach ...' But temporal expressions (like place expressions) can be
stacked, äs in the following example:
(ii)
[Heute morgen waehrend des Fruehstuecks] habe ich ...
today morning during
the breakfast
have I ...
This morning during breakfast I have ...'
It is no surprise that we can substitute am Strand for waehrend des Fruehstuecks in (ii):
(iii)
Heute morgen am Strand habe ich ...
Other examples of non-constituent fronting in the literature are ungrammatical in my dialect:
(iv)
* [Seinem Nachbarn das Buch] wollte er
nicht geben
his
neighbor the book wanted he not give
dat
acc
nom
'He didn't want to give the book to his neighbor*
15. By assigning the same structures to (37), (38), and (42), and their equivalents with the
anaphoric pronoun, we follow an analysis of similar Dutch examples in Koster (1978).
16. A reviewer notes that another test is 50-pronominalization, but that this test is not apBrought to you by | University of Arizona
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243
plicable to German, because the language doesn't have a dummy modal-verb like do to serve
äs a place-holder. This difference between English and German thus reduces to a difference
which is completely independent of the configurationality issue.
17. An example would be the following:
(i)
V-compl
INFL-mod
V-Compl
INFL
dem Mann morgen
ein Buch zu
the man
tomorrow a book to
'to give a book to the man tomorrow'
V
schenken
give
18. This of course we have to stipulate in the current paper, but we hope that it will follow
from a correct theory of verb movement.
19. Sentences with fronted verb negation are of course possible:
(i)
Nicht gekauft hat er das Buch, sondern gestohlen
not bought has he the book but
stolen
'He hasn't bought the book but rather has stolen it'
But although the following sentence is ambiguous depending on whether the negation has
scope only over the embedded sentence or the matrix sentence, in the fronted version the nicht
(negation) can only have scope over the embedded sentence, although Tappe's theory allows
fronting independent of the Interpretation of nicht:
(ii)
weil Hans Maria nicht zu kuessen versucht
bec. Hans Maria not to kiss
tries
nom acc
(iii)
[Maria nicht zu kuessen] versucht Hans
Maria not to kiss
tries
Hans
acc
nom
Note also the difference between the following sentences:
(iv)
Gestern wurde nicht getanzt
Yesterday was not danced
(v)
[Getanzt wurde gestern nicht
(vi)
* [Nicht getanzt] wurde gestern
(vii)
[Nicht getanzt] wurde gestern, sondern gesungen
not danced was yesterday but
sung
'People didn't dance yesterday, rather they sang'
Only (iv) is OK, since the nicht contrastively negates the verb; (vi) with VP-negation is ungrammatical, which is not predicted by Tappe's reanalysis rule.
20. That the German sentence in (50) is not completely äs bad äs the English one might be
due to the fact that bare infmitives in German share some of the properties of participles in
English (Jan Koster, personal communication), where (51) is grammatical. In English the
following sentence is also possible:
(i)
John was seen to dance
The corresponding active sentence is ungrammatical:
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(ii)
I saw John to dance
Williams (1983) discusses sentences of this type. The German sentence corresponding to (i) is
ungrammatical (*Peter wurde zu tanzen gesehen), presumably because the language doesn't
allow sentences like the following, which are grammatical in English:
(iii)
*Das ist der Mann den Fernseher zu reparieren
this is the man the TV-set
to fix
'This is the man to fix the TV-set'
English allows such sentences, but not with proper nouns äs the modifiees. This might explain
the difference between (i) and (ii). In (i) the element modified by the adjunct sentence is an NPtrace - a non-name - whereas in (ii) it is a name.
The same argument can be made for German and English causative verbs (lassen vs. let).
Normally lassen äs an ACI-verb cannot be passivized:
(iv)
*Er wurde das Buch aufheben gelassen
(v)
*He was made pick up the book
What is surprising is that lassen can be passivized, if the embedded verb is ergative:
(vi)
Die Werkzeuge wurden fallengelassen
the tools
were fall - let
'Somebody let the tools fall'
I have no explanation for this fact.
21. We will return to such examples of pied-piping. In later work Haider (1985b), contrary
to his original proposal, denies that the structure of sentences like (56) and (57) in the main
text contains a pied-piped S'. This new claim will be discussed later in connection with the Condition on Extraction Domains.
22. This example is originally due to John ROSS.
23. I owe the Dutch examples to Liesbeth Lemmens.
24. Allegedly not all Speakers of German fully accept sentences like (101). If this is true, it
does not affect our discussion, since at least Haider (1982, 13), Kratzer (1984, 45), and I accept
sentences with fronted nominative noun phrases corresponding to internal arguments. Our
discussion only holds for the dialect which has sentences like (101).
25. Non-finite sentences in this System do have a VP though, since there is no agreement in
these sentences, so that INFL is weaker than the verb and V-INFL leads to a projection line
a = V, a' = V etc.
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