Sprachvariation

The objective of this article is twofold: From a theoretical point of view its main goal is to combine a variationist approach to clause final verb clusters in 12.000 embedded Low German clauses with a generativist analysis of the structure of these clusters. From a more concrete point of view the article describes and inter-relates the different sequences of one, two, and three verbal element(s) and their complements. After analyzing the data collected in five Mennonite colonies in North and South America, three different types of speakers could be identified, their behavior suggesting that Mennonite Low German verb phrases are, contrary to modern syntactic theory, head-final and left-branching. All clusters surfacing as more parsing-friendly right-branching structures are considered to be the result of (multiple) raising and adjoining of verb phrases to the right of a head-final functional projection.