V3-Stellung im Deutschen: Wettbewerb um das Vorfeld

The following paper deals with one of the greatest challenges for the typology of German as a strict V2-language. It is claimed that in German there can be only one constituent in front of the finite verb, the so-called prefield. Extensive collection of data mainly from German newspapers has shown that there are sentences with multiple fronted constituents that are judged perfectly grammatical by German speakers. I will show that these sentences (that I will refer to as V3-sentences) are underlying certain restrictions that are not only valid for this class of ‘exceptional’ sentences, but hold for all German sentences as they result from general principles of precedence and information structure.