Typologie

The aim of the present article is twofold. Firstly I want to illustrate that German shows grammatical phenomena that remind one of split ergativity. Thus I want to present case marking patterns in (Modern High) German that help to understand a phenomenon that is supposed to be very exotic and difficult to grasp for a German native speaker. The second contribution is the proposal of a case linking mechanism that is different from the preponderant proposals on the market by Wunderlich (1994/1997), Primus (1999b) and Haider (1993). Although this linking device is still to be developed further and has been formulated mainly for German, it is offered here to apply quite generally.