Linguistische Berichte Heft 201

This article deals with the analysis of the German clause structure. The following aspects are discussed: Verb last vs. verb initial sentences, fronting of constituents in verb second sentences, verbal complexes and Incomplete Category Fronting. The analysis presented here is the only HPSG analysis that explains the constituent order facts and that is compatible with the analysis of multiple constituents in front of the finite verb that is suggested in (Müller, Erscheint 2005).

This paper examines the role of orthography in alternations of the type atom~atomic. Previous studies have established that the alternation requires orthographic reference, although how it is used has never been satisfactorily accounted for. Through examination of all possible combinations of the orthography, the phonology and the stress, it is shown that only one set-up will account for the alternations and for the productivity shown in forced derivations of the type petal~*petallic, where *petallic is unlikely to be in the subject’s lexicon. The paper concludes that orthography must take position as the primary system, with stress applied directly to it to produce the desired phonological output. This also goes some way to account for the tendency towards Spelling Pronunciation in literate speakers.

In previous studies, it was demonstrated that the time course of typing and handwriting follows a syllabic pattern. This raises the question of whether this pattern is caused by phonological processes or whether it reflects an independent structure of the graphemic pathway. The case of AB is presented. He is a fluent German aphasic, who, in spite of the absence of articulatory deficits, displays superior written word production compared to his spoken word production. It is argued that AB’s phonological impairment arises from damage to the lexical system, rather than to the sublexical system. Additionally, AB suffers from severe damage to the phoneme-grapheme-conversion system, as indicated by his severe impairment to write non-words to dictation. It is therefore suggested that AB’s spelling is not phonologically mediated, either by lexical or by sublexical processes. The analysis of the time course of AB’s single word typing reveals no syllabic effects as it was found in healthy adult controls. In contrast to healthy adult controls though, AB does not show a systematically increased delay at the syllable onsets within words during single word typing. This finding suggests that AB is unable to group graphemes into syllables or syllable-like units. The implications of this finding for the view of an autonomous orthographic syllable are discussed, i.e. an orthographic syllable being independent of any phonological influences.

This paper illustrates the general procedures linguists and technicians at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (MPIP) have been developing for gathering (cross-cultural and crosslinguistic) data, for processing and documenting these data, and for archiving them. The paper ends with an outlook on future developments with respect to the documentation of (endangered) languages and language archiving.