Linguistische Berichte Heft 203

This short report presents an experimental exploration of the intonation of German embedded clauses, based on the data of an Austrian speaker of German. The right edge of an intonation phrase is indicated by upstep and by edge tones with this speaker. A right edge of an intonation phrase is regularly found at the right edge of clauses, including embedded clauses, though not preceding medial left edges of clauses. This cannot be captured by the proposal of Downing (1970) to the effect that only root clauses form obligatory intonation phrases, and suggests that clauses affect intonation phrase formation even when they are syntactically more deeply embedded. A brief account in Optimality Theory is presented that relates the present findings to those discussed by Downing. The account generalizes the interaction of Alignment and Wrapping from phonological phrases to intonation phrases.

In this article I discuss examples of multiple constituents before the finite verb in German. I provide an analysis that uses an empty verbal head that takes the elements before the finite verb as arguments or adjuncts. The empty verbal head that is used for the analysis of multiple frontings is identical to the empty verbal head that is used to account for the analysis of verb first sentences (verb movement). The analysis uses techniques that were developed independently for the analysis of Incomplete Category Fronting.

This paper discusses a particular adjectival construction in Arabic, in which an adjective is modified by a noun which is assigned genitive case by the adjective. Although the genitive noun appears to be the subject of the adjective, it is shown that this is actually not the case. Rather, the genitive noun is an internal argument of the adjective. The adjective plus noun combination is used as a predicate, and the noun specifies to which aspect of the subject the adjective specifically applies.

I pursue the concept of a generative lexical device, which organizes the mapping between conceptual and linguistic representations. The design of the interface function between grammar and concepts upholds a modular conception of linguistic structure building even in environments where information from various computational levels have to be calculated. Against this background, I argue that the German copula werden (‘become’) imposes two core conditions on its adjectival complement: i.) the state that holds after the denoted transition has to represent a non-controlled property of the subject nominal and ii.) the planned construction must not be blocked by a higher frequent lexical form. Several conceptual and grammatical tests are applied and examined for their explanatory adequacy. As regards the CONTROL restriction, it is illustrated that a generic reading of the subject nominal converts a controlled into a noncontrolled property thus saving the derivation of werden-complexes like kostenlos werden, which fails under a specific (i.e. non-generic) reading. Furthermore, the illegality of DATIVE nominals – tolerated by most unaccusative verbs – is motivated by means of structural rationales, which reflect the semantic CONTROL condition. The factor of BLOCKING is associated, first, with the compositionality of the (semantically identical) blocked form and, second, with the attestability of the blocked form, for which some empirical evidence is gathered. I maintain the position that werden does not impose any rigorous event structural condition on its complement: It realizes both achievement as well as accomplishment expressions to an equal extent.