Claudia Felser

The current study examines the effect of Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) on clausal extraposition in German, focusing on the positioning of relative clauses (RCs) and finite noun complement clauses (NCCs). Drawing on evidence from newspaper corpus, acceptability judgement, and elicited production data, we explored whether DLM effects are consistent across clause types and modalities. While our results confirm earlier findings showing a bias towards keeping extraposition distance short and effects of clause length, we found that RCs and NCCs differed in their probability of being extraposed, reflecting their distinct syntactic properties. We also found differences among our three data types. While acceptability judge-ments showed an overall preference for integrated clauses, our corpus data show an overall preference for extraposition for NCCs and no clear preference for RCs. The results from our sentence production tasks revealed a strong avoidance of extraposition for RCs but a preference for extraposition for NCCs. Taken together, our findings indicate that the DLM constraint interacts with a dependent clause’s grammatical status and also applies differently across data types. On the methodological side, our findings highlight the importance of considering multi-ple types of data to establish how and to what extent word-order preferences are determined by processing-efficiency biases such as the DLM constraint. mehr

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. mehr