In: W. Detmar Meurers, Tibor Kiss (eds): Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax. CSLI Publications. pp. 257-300
In this paper, we discuss a new analysis of the left periphery of
German finite sentences. Our HPSG analysis builds on empirical
generalizations previously formulated in the topological fields model
of German sentence structure. Its main idea is to lexicalize
the left periphery or, in other words, to explain the topological
makeup of the left periphery of finite sentences in terms of certain
properties of a class of lexical elements. A key characteristic of
these lexical elements is that exactly one of them must introduce
each finite sentence. The main arguments favoring our new perspective
are drawn from well known but puzzling facts about the
distribution of inflectional morphemes at the left
periphery of finite sentences in a number of Germanic languages, and
from observations that reveal clear differences between finite verbs
in sentence initial and in sentence final position. We show that
a lexical theory of the elements at the left periphery of finite
sentences allows natural empirical generalizations that nonlexical or
phrase structure-based accounts have not been able to provide.
The syntactic analysis is complemented by a concrete proposal of
how to provide logical forms for the syntactic structures. As
semantic representation language, we employ a higher order
type-theoretic language, Ty2, which is widely accepted as a standard
in natural language semantics, and exploit techniques first pioneered
by theories of underspecified semantics for the formulation of
semantic composition rules that derive the meaning of each phrase from
the meaning of its daughters.
Bibtex entry:
@incollection{Richter:Sailer:leftperiph, author = {Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer}, title = {{On the Left Periphery of German Finite Sentences}}, booktitle = {Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax}, editor = {Meurers, W. Detmar and Tibor Kiss}, year = {2001}, pages = {257--300}, publisher = {CSLI Publications} }