Volume 46, Issue 2

In this paper, I provide an alternative psycholinguistic interpretation of so-called brace constructions in German. Brace constructions (e. g. “Thomas muss morgen eine Klausur schreiben .” or “… wenn Thomas morgen eine Klausur schreibt .” ) can be regarded as the typical structural features of German. The analysis proposed in this article is based on linguistic phenomena which can be observed in language production of both L2 learners and native speakers. The aim of my analysis is to develop a preliminary model that reflects aspects of human language processing. The model is based on the concept of tension that arises during the language production process in case of the analytical realization of certain lexical concepts (in the case of so-called separable verbs) or grammatical concepts (including tense, passive, modality, subject). The elements involved in an analytical realization are conceptually (lexically or grammatically) combined but they have to be separated from one another in serialization and placed in a distance structure. From this interpretation, the typical structural features of German are, above all, distance structures, which consist of the finite auxiliary or modal verb and the full verb in main clauses, and in subordinate clauses of the subject and the finite verb due to subject-verb agreement. The proposed Model provides explanations also for other interlanguage phenomena associated with structural aspects in other languages. On the basis of this concept of tension, other learning difficulties can also be predicted, which can arise in the learning of certain corresponding structures in certain languages.

The paper deals with degree gradation of verbs in German. Gradation is a process of comparing degrees on a scale but not all gradable verbs lexicalize a suitable gradation scale. In the paper, a definition of ‘lexically scalar predicate’ is proposed and based on that definition, it is argued that some gradable verbs are not lexically scalar. I argue essentially that such verbs require the activation of a gradation scale. The scale is licensed by the lexical semantics of the gradable verb but retrieved from the conceptual knowledge associated with the verb.

The Old High German clause connector wanta (‘because’) has been variously categorized in the literature, as well as in the largest existing corpus of annotated Old High German texts (the Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch ), with respect to its selectional properties: when it introduces a causal clause, it is generally classified as a conjunction with variable (coordinating or subordinating) formal features or, in a smaller number of cases, as an adverb. This heterogeneous taxonomy, however, does not seem to be systematically justified by any evident semantic or syntactic correlate. In this paper, it is shown – on the basis of data from the main prose texts of this period – that wanta exhibits the same interpretive flexibility as embedding Present-Day German weil (viz. a propositional and a speech-act related reading) and that at least its function as a subordinating conjunction can, in most cases, be disambiguated by means of diagnostic tests (e. g., the predicates it introduces can resume cataphoric main-clause pronouns and appear in topicalized positions). The aim of the present contribution is therefore twofold: in the first place, to descriptively address the strategies for the expression of causation in Old High German; in the second place, to provide a precise syntactic categorization for Old High German wanta as a complementizer that may be of help to historical syntacticians who analyze clause phenomena in the above mentioned sources; finally, to address the methodological problem related to the categorization of non-disambiguable occurrences of wanta .