Linguistische Berichte Heft 202

Two main types of sentences are traditionally distinguished in the context of semantic theories of questions and answers: declarative sentences, corresponding to statements, and interrogative sentences, corresponding to questions. The interrogative forms can be further subdivided into dialectical ones (yes-no-questions) and non-dialectical ones (constituent questions). These distinctions are made for both root and embedded sentences. The predicates that select sentential complements fall into three classes: predicates that license only declaratives, those that allow only for interrogatives, and those that embed both types of sentences. In this connection, verbs of doubt are interesting in that they allow for declaratives as well as dialectical interrogatives, while non-dialectical interrogatives do not seem to be appropriate complements. In what follows, our main concern will be with the German verb of doubt zweifeln and its possible sentential complements. Speaker intuitions as to which constructions are grammatical or acceptable vary, particularly with respect to rare expressions like zweifeln. Interviews and corpus analysis were therefore applied as a means to acquire reliable linguistic data. These as well as data from historical sources and from some languages other than German (esp. English and Italian) are presented and analysed. In the last section, based on the notion of ‘subjective probability’, an attempt is made at explaining the observations.

The timing of the loss of NegV1 in early English is compared with the loss of the negative particle ne and the rise of secondary negation. A verse corpus of Middle English verse is used, allowing comparison throughout the time-span of the Middle English period. Neg V1 in Old and Early Middle English is related to a strong but uninterpretable [+neg] feature on C0, which was checked by an interpretable [+neg] feature on Neg0, spelt out as ne. As the interpretable [+neg] feature formerly on Neg0 became a Spec feature in NegP, a strong [+ neg] feature on C became unviable, since the negated verb’s [+neg] feature was now uninterpretable and was eliminated before the verb could raise to check a strong feature on C0. It is shown that this development was not triggered by the loss of the negative particle ne, which followed the decline of NegV1. It is suggested that it may have been related to the rise of secondary negation, though data is insufficient to substantiate this possibility. In learnability terms, both the existence of the strong [+neg] feature on C0 in early English and its loss were posited on the basis of syntactic evidence, rather than morphology. The formal expression of the prefix ne was not relevant to the loss of NegV1. Our claims are compared with the proposals of van Kemenade (2000) and Eythórsson (2002) with respect to negation in Early Germanic languages.

The phonological inventory of German is subject to a fierce controversy. With respect to simple full vowels, the proposals vary between 8 and 22 units. The reason for these differences is that the determination of a phonological inventory is theory-dependent. In this paper, the compilation of the phonological inventory of German is tackled from the viewpoint of an autonomous declarative conception of phonology. Defining phonology as the study of the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic properties of potentially meaning-distinguishing elements, there is only one level of representation that is strictly phonological. On this level (which resembles surface structure in generative approaches) German proves to have 15 full vowels besides the two reduced vowels schwa and vocalic rhotic. While length turns out to be a phonetic factor only, word stress as well as the number of reduced syllables is being established as phonologically relevant. In the field of consonants, German has 6 stops (excluding the glottal stop), 11 fricatives, and 5 sonorants. Moreover, the syntagmatic character of diphthongs and affricates is discussed. The exposition is supplemented by considerations concerning the method of minimal pairs and the impact of complementary distribution on the status of elements as phonological. The results of the survey are almost identical with Vennemann (1982).