Linguistische Berichte Heft 247

Research in Historical Syntax has gained impetus from the 1980s onwards. Especially the mutual semination of theoretically oriented research (e.g. generative grammar) and Historical Linguistics proved to be fruitful. This article aims at outlining the general development of the field of Historical Syntax research and at presenting some recently discussed topics in theoretically informed research on Historical Syntax, choosing German as object language. The topics chosen for the discussion are research on the left periphery, constituent order, the right periphery, the realization of subject pronouns, the syntax of the noun phrase and the syntax of negation. While the research is quite advanced, there is still room for further advancements, e.g. in the synthesis of the (historical synchronic) singular studies to diachronic treatises in the sense that developments are traced throughout the attested language history, or in the consequent inclusion of diatopic variation.

The phenomenon of right dislocation is attested for many typologically distinct languages and has been investigated in terms of its morpho-syntax, prosody and information structure. Another construction at the right periphery often confused with right dislocation is that of afterthought. While right dislocations create a comment-topic structure, afterthoughts clarify an ambiguous reference, which has been made in the preceding context. This information structural distinction is here formalized on the basis of Centering Theory. Both constructions are used in written language as well and serve the same functions as in spoken language. This study aims to investigate whether naive readers of texts that either contain right dislocation or afterthought recognize these structures correctly. For this purpose, a reading production experiment was conducted and intonation contours of the read texts were matched against the contours of spontaneous speech. Results revealed that participants distinguish between right dislocation and afterthought on the basis of phrasing (i.e. boundary strength) but not accent patterns. The distinction of right dislocation and afterthought was also present in terms of the reduction of pitch range, which showed a rather complex pattern but was overall greater in right dislocations than in afterthoughts.

The article presents a problem of demarcation which hasn't been discussed in phraseology research so far: the differentiation between modified idioms and phrase schemata. With the help of a corpus based approach and on the basis of so called formulaic (ir-)regularities (i.e. phrasemes which deviate more or less from the synchronic free language use, e.g. auf gut Glück or seines (eigenen) Glückes Schmied sein), it will be shown that in certain cases the transition between modifications and phrase schemata is fluent. The method used in this article is a type of corpus analysis called slot analysis (based on the "Deutsches Referenzkorpus"/"German reference corpus") (Steyer 2013). On the one hand, corpus analysis allows for the illustration of such problems of demarcation. On the other hand, this method can be an important instrument in the operationalization of an exact differentiation between modified and schematic phrasemes on the basis of quantitative analysis of real language use.

Current research features two different explanations for coordination ellipsis (a type of grammatical ellipsis). The assumption most frequently found there is that these constructions result from omissions of constituents to be filled in when interpreting them. In contrast, in the coupling approach elaborated here the suggestion is that the elliptical part of the construction is directly or indirectly linked with the (supposedly) missing sequence in the non-elliptical part. Relying on constituent grammar and valence grammar we show how this second approach can be validated in theories of grammar. To make this work, the representational foundations of these grammars have to be reorganised in order to solve the theoretical and methodological problems associated with them. This procedure leads, more generally, to new insights concerning the structure and the representation of sentences. Above all, one has to assume two-dimensional structures in which both, the constituent structure and the valence structure generate independent couplings; at the same time, in addition to sequential valence relations parallel valence relations have to be considered.