Verb Movement and Topicalization in German
Antonios Tsiknakis, BU Wuppertal, Germany
The talk deals with the contribution of verb movement and topicalization to the mean-ing (sentence mood) of the German clause types in (1):
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a. Küsst1 Maria den Postboten t1? (verb first y/n
-interrogative) kisses Maria the postman
‘Does Maria kiss the postman?’
b. Wen küsst1 Maria t1? (verb second wh-interrogative)
who.ACC kisses Maria
‘Who does Maria kiss?’
c. [Den Postboten]2 küsst1 Maria t2 t1. (verb second declarative)
the postman.ACC kisses Maria
‘Maria kisses the postman.’
The first part of the talk problematizes two competing approaches about sentence mood: firstly, the traditional approach represented in Altmann (1993) according to which sentence moods include an illocutionary predicate encoding the speaker’s at-titude towards the descriptive content of the clause and secondly, the approach in Portner (2005) according to which the speaker’s attitude is derived from the descript-ive content’s semantic type.
Against this background, the second part of the talk outlines a theory about verb movement and topicalization which is based on a comparison of the use potential of the clause types in (1) with the potential of their corresponding types in (2) where neither verb movement nor topicalization takes place (cf. Tsiknakis 2016, 2017):
(2) a. ob Maria den Postboten küsst (verb-final y/n-interrogative)
whether Maria the postman kisses
‘whether Maria kisses the postman’
b. wen Maria küsst (verb-final wh-interrogative)
who.ACC Maria kisses
‘who Maria kisses’
c. dass Maria den Postboten küsst (verb-final dass-clause) that Maria the postman kisses
‘that Maria kisses the postman’
I will propose that verb movement is triggered by an interpretable clause type feature [F1] and topicalization by a feature [F2] which modifies the interpretation of [F1]. The interpretation of the proposed features will be modeled in a framework of dynamic semantics which represents the common information of the discourse participants in (embedded) context sets (cf. Stalnaker 1978, Farkas 2003, Roberts 2012). I will argue that [F1] limits the use of a clause to environments which involve an update of a doxastic context set and that [F2] regulates whether this operation is supposed to be completed directly in the context which results by the anchoring of the clause in a given context or indirectly in a context which follows the output context of the anchoring.
Maintaining a middle position between Altmann’s maximalist and Portner’s mini-malist approach to sentence mood, the presented theory illustrates how morphosyn-tactic characteristics of the left periphery in German clauses are interpreted at the semantics/pragmatics interface in a compositional manner.
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References
Altmann, Hans 1993. Satzmodus. In: Jacobs, Joachim, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds.). Syntax. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenöss-ischer Forschung. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1006–1029.
Farkas, Donka 2003. Assertion, Belief and Mood Choice. Paper presented at ESSLLI, Conditional and Unconditional Modality Workshop, Vienna. URL: http://people. ucsc.edu/~farkas/papers/mood.pdf (visited on 31/10/2016).
Portner, Paul 2005. The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types. In: Watanabe, Kazuha & Robert Young (eds.). Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 14. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, 235–252.
Roberts, Craige 2012. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formaltheory of pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics 5, 1–69. DOI: 10.3765/sp.5.6.
Stalnaker, Robert 1978. Assertion. In: Cole, Peter (ed.). Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 315–332.
Tsiknakis, Antonios 2016. Die (a)symmetrische Distribution von [±wh]-Phrasen. Zur Syn-tax und Interpretation deklarativer und interrogativer Satztypen. PhD thesis. Wuppertal: Bergische Universität Wuppertal.– 2017.
Zur Kategorie von Verbzweit- und Verbletztsätzen. In: Nefedov, Sergej, Ljubov Gregorieva & Bettina Bock (eds.). Deutsch als Bindeglied zwischen Inlands- und Aus-landsgermanistik. Beiträge zu den 23. GeSusS-Linguistik-Tagen in Sankt Petersburg, 22.– 24. Juni 2015. (Sprache und Sprachen in Forschung und Anwendung (SiFA) 5). Ham-burg: Verlag Dr. Kovaˇc, 413–422.