Linguistische Berichte Heft 226

This paper investigates the function and underlying structure of integrated verb first parentheticals like glaubt sie. Written data show first and third person parentheticals with glauben to differ with regard to their preferred syntactic positions. Considering the modal particle glaub, this difference can be attributed to a greater degree of grammaticalization in the first person parentheticals. The data further suggest synchronic variation in that certain constructions can be analyzed as either main clauses containing a parenthetical in prefinite position or being instances of extraction from verb second complements. In their function as epistemic or evidential adverbials, genuine verb first parentheticals are argued not to contain traces of internal arguments or any other empty elements.

In this paper, we investigate a special kind of determiner in German, which has gone unnoticed so far, namely DPs with doubled definite determiners (we dub them 'DD-DPs' for doubled definite DPs). We argue that they are non-referential expressions that not only constrain the current discourse model in which they can felicitously be used, but also a related speech context. We suggest that DD-DPs presuppose the existence of a speech context other than the current one, and that a definite or name must be used in the presupposed conversation. We also show that, with the help of the pragmatic principle 'Maximize Presupposition', DD-DPs give rise to an implicated presupposition of non-uniqueness.

In German a positional verb is frequently used to describe spatial relations. The verb is chosen from an alternate set to encode the orientation and disposition of the located object. On a German breakfast table, for example, the bread and the knife are 'lying' while the plates and jam are 'standing'. For a non-native German speaker this kind of categorization often remains very confusing, especially when the speaker's mother tongue does not encode posture at all when giving a local statement.

This paper will look at German positional verbs from an acquisition perspective. Drawing on elicited speech production data it will be shown that German hängen 'to hang' is the first systematically used positional verb and is indeed so in both first and second language acquistion.