Linguistische Berichte Heft 187

In contrast to its country of origin, ethnomethodological conversation analysis has found followers not only among sociologists but also among linguists in many European countries. Aside from the continuing investigation of classic conversation analytic questions, research initiatives have recently begun to emerge which endeavor to combine more strictly linguistic interests with conversation analytic methodology. This kind of research has come to be known as 'interactional linguistics'. The present contribution reviews some of the issues which are currently being discussed in this field of inquiry and outlines potential research questions, goals, methods and gains for a genuinely 'interactional' approach to linguistics.

We propose an analysis for expletive-associate constructions within the minimalist framework outlined by Chomsky (1991, and later). Specifically, we argue that the expletive is an argument expression that must raise to the (most) extemal subject position in order to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle and check nominative case, while number agreement is checked by the associate. We present evidence against the assumption that the associate is assigned inherent or structural partitive by the verb, and instead suggest that it receives default case. In conjunction with the Kratzer/Diesing theory of indefinites, our analysis is shown to account for some well-known semantic restrictions on existential sentences, as weil as for the relatively weaker definiteness effects observed in transitive expletive constructions.

The article examines the grapheme in German, in particular the mute . On the basis of a word list with mute (= 175 lexemes) as weil as one without mute (= 203 lexemes) different explanations are discussed. An explanation is favored in the framework of so-called ,,grammaticalization". On the conclusion consequences for the „autonomy thesis" are drawn.