Postmodifying verb-second clauses in spoken German

Weinert, Regina (2012) Postmodifying verb-second clauses in spoken German. Functions of Language, 19 (2). pp. 235-264. ISSN 0929-998X

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Abstract

This usage-based and corpus-based study examines the use of verb-second clauses as restrictive postmodifiers of noun phrases in spoken German (ich kenn leute die haben immer pech - ‘I know people they are always unlucky’) in relation to verb-final relative clauses. Previous accounts largely work with de-contextualised and constructed data and stop short of accounting for the discourse function of verb-second postmodifying structures. The ratio of verb-final relative clauses to postmodifying verb-second clauses does not indicate a shift towards main clause syntax. Rather, the verb-second clauses form part of a set of existential or presentational and specificational constructions which serve to highlight properties of entities and/or introduce discourse topics. Relative clauses can be used for such functions, but this is not as common. The syntactic and semantic features associated with postmodifying verb-second clauses can be seen as a direct result of their discourse function, which only a corpus analysis could reveal. The paper also comments on the wider related aspects of verb position, clause combining and pronoun use in spoken German from the perspective of a usage-based language model.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Q100 Linguistics
Depositing User:	Regina Weinert
Date Deposited:	25 Apr 2012 11:27
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 12:04
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6443

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