Scrambling in German : Extraction into the Mittelfeld

Scrambling in German - Extraction into the Mittelfeld Stefan Mailer* Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin August, 1995 Abstract German is a language with a relatively free word order. During the last few years considerable efforts have been made in all syntactic frameworks to explain so-called scrambling phenomena. In the following paper, I deal with some tough cases of German word order which cannot be described by assuming flat sentence structures or word order domains. The phenomena discussed are PP complements of nouns and adjec- tives, which can appear separated from their heads in the German Mittelfeld, and stranded prepositions. The similarity to fronting of these elements is used to explain these phenomena by a generalized version of the head-filler schema used in the standard HPSG framework. Subject Areas: Nontransformational syntax of German, HPSG 1 Introduction There are two basic ideas how to describe scrambling in languages with relatively free constituent order in certain syntactic domains. Firstly, one can assume that a kind of movement takes place, i.e., there is a position in a string where something is missing (a trace) and there is a corresponding position at another location in the string where the missing constituent appears. The alternative is to allow con- stituents to appear in any order in some particular domain. This domain usually is the domain of the head of a phrase. In HPSG [4], order variation is commonly associated with ordering variations among sister constituents in a flat structure. This concept was extended by Mike Reape [6] to allow for complex domain for- mation operations which—in his approach—are driven by a feature called UNIONED. In the combination of signs, a functor can specify the UNIONED value of its ar- guments. The functor is either the head in a head-complement structure or the adjunct in a head-adjunct structure. If one allows adjuncts to domain-union with their heads, the fact that adjuncts can appear at any position between complements in the Mittelfeld can be accounted for. In the following, I will give an account that employs both word order domains and the NONLOCAL-mechanism provided by HPSG. I will not use the UNIONED- feature suggested by Reape since it can be shown that the clause union phenomena which Reape describes with domain-union can be accounted for with argument attraction along the lines of Hinrichs and Nakazawa [1]. *e-mail: stef an.ecomp3.ing . hu-berl in . de t Thanks to Frank Keller and Andreas Kathol for comments on an earlier version of this paper. The full version of this paper is available via WWW http://www.compling.hu- berlin.de/"stefan/PS/scrambling.ps.gz 79 2 Phenomena The German main sentence is partitioned into at least four topological fields: Vor- feld, linke Satzklammer (finite verb), Mittelfeld and rechte Satzklammer or Ver- balkomplex (verb cluster). Sentences with a verb in second position are assumed to be derived from sentences with verb-initial position by fronting of one constituent. It is possible to front almost all kinds of constituents. In (1) for instance, the indirect object is fronted. (1) [Dem Mann]i hat die …

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