Linguistische Berichte Heft 193

Data taken from the field of French prepositional elements clearly show that essential work in Grammaticalization Theory needs support from a framework which accounts in a fruitful way for instances of syntactic change. In this paper I show that prepositional forms which emerge from complex structures containing verb forms and relational nouns on the one band and case marking elements recruited from the lexical category P on the other can plausibly be dealt with by adopting a Minimalist perspective in the spirit of Chomsky (1995). In this context I argue that some uses of certain French P elements should be interpreted as overt realizations of inherent case, comparable to the agglutinative case affixes of Turkic languages. Furthermore I demonstrate that the emergence of new prepositional forms follows the requirements of derivational economy. Finally it is pointed out that a cube shaped Grammaticalization model accounts in a more adequate way for the facts observed than the scalar representation, traditionally assumed by Grammaticalization theorists.

The processing of syntactic information during language production has up to now undergone little empirical examination. One exception is the establishment of subject-verb-agreement (e.g., Bock & Miller 1991). In the respective experimental paradigm, sentence beginnings (preambles) of varying syntactic complexity are presented auditorily to the subjects. The task of the subjects is to repeat and subsequently complete these preambles. In the present article, we present an experiment done within this paradigm in order to examine the processes underlying the production of relative clauses. The hypotheses that were tested in this experiment are generated from the local-connectionist model of language production proposed by Schade (1999). The model allows predictions with regard to (a) the cognitive processes involved in language production, (b) an occasionally occuring memory overload during language production, and ( c) the resulting errors in the overt responses of the subjects. The data of the experiment yielded the predicted error pattems (verb omissions and complete abortions of sentence production) as weil as some weil known phenomena regarding subject-verb-agreement.

In generative grammar, the proper notion of finiteness is the subject of ongoing debate. In most languages, finiteness in a sentence is only present if the verbal complex exhibits both tense and agreement morphology. In this case, the verb Iicenses a subject in the nominative case. Thus, we can formulate the following implication: tense ➔ agreement ➔ nominative subject. That is, if a verb obligatorily lacks a nominative subject, neither tense nor agreement are realised morphologically. But there are Special cases where an „infinite" verb has a lexical subject: this article discusses the Latin Accusativus Cum Infinitivo (ACI). In this infinitival complement, the verbal morphology exposes a tense morpheme when there are no agreement markers. The infinitival construction has a lexical subject, which surfaces in the accusative case. Thus, the above-mentioned implication is not fully met. In order to account for the structural properties of the accusative subject, first it is shown that the checking relation between the infinitival subject and the infinite verb is a local one, i.e. no checking involving movement of the infinitival subject into the matrix sentence takes place. Second, I propose that finiteness does not just result from tense and agreement morphology on the verb but that finiteness consists in the denotation of modality. Moreover, I assume that the denotational power of an infinitival paradigm can license a subject. Finally, I demonstrate that the subject accusative results from a language-specific feature instrumental in the nominal paradigm. In this article I do not submit any empirical findings on the Latin ACL My aim is to take such well-founded research findings as have emerged to date in this regard and hamess them for syntactic modelling and the interpretive approaches ofmodem generative grammar.

In this paper I will argue that Berliner is an adjective in constructions like Berliner Luft. But adjectives like Berliner have certain defects. While they are restricted to the attributive position they are not inflectable, even though the attributive position normally requires inflected adjectives. This surprising behavior will be explained by the form ofthe1suffix (-er) and by the fact that there is almost always a noun homonymous with the adjective.