Linguistische Berichte Heft 271

The German possessive sein is usually classified as a pronoun of the 3rd person singular masculine and neuter. However, in the grammatical literature some descriptions of sein instead of an expected 3rd person singular feminine possessive pronoun ihr referring to feminine antecedents can be found. Based on search queries in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo it is shown that the phenomenon can be empirically established. While certain collocations displaying a high amount of neuter pronoun antecedents might be favorable for the use of sein (allesNEUTER hat seinen Preis ‘everything has its price’ > QualitätFEMININE hat seinen Preis ‘quality has its price’), it turns out that the semantics of the antecedent is decisive. In most examples, the feminine antecedent is an inanimate noun. This suggests that sein is underlyingly unmarked with respect to gender, while the feminine ihr is primarily a pronoun denoting female sex and only secondarily feminine gender.

In this paper we will argue that the analysis of lies, fallacies, and misunderstandings requires a complex model including a heterogeneous common ground based on reportative and situational evidence (cf. Farkas & Bruce 2010) and two additional layers, beliefs and objective facts. Lies can be defined by using the concept of reportative evidence, i. e. there is a contrast between an utterance and the utterer’s beliefs. Fallacies arise if a person is mistaken with regard to the situational evidence, i. e. there is a contrast between her beliefs and the objective facts. Misunderstandings, again, refer to reportative evidence, i. e. there is a contrast between the intended meaning of an utterance and the way it is understood by the hearer. Whereas the analysis of liesproves that the common ground is based on evidence and not on mutual belief, the analysis of fallacies and misunderstandings shows that both its situational and its reportative part have to split up into one part that is clearly fixed and another part that is open to interpretation and thus endangered by these communication failures.

This article addresses the impossibility of topicalization in verb final complement clauses in German. In the first part of the paper, existing research dealing with this phenomenon is discussed. Following this, an alternative approach is suggested which is embedded in a general theory of finite verb movement to the left periphery and topicalization in interrogative and declarative clause types. In a nutshell, it will be established that both syntactic processes are triggered by respective clause type features whose interpretation leads to an update of the question under discussion or the common ground of the context in prototypical utterance situations. Finally, the paper is concluded with the proposition to treat the feature triggering topicalization asa functor that modifies the interpretation of the feature which is triggering verb movement and therefore presupposes its presence for reasons of interpretability.