Walt Detmar Meurers
Frank van Eynde, Lars Hellan and Dorothee Beerman (Eds.): Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
This paper challenges the assumption that the nature of apparent word order and verb form irregularities in the German verbal complex is that of an irreducible cluster of idiosyncrasies surrounding an exceptional word order possibility.
I discuss two lesser known sets of data which raise serious problems for the traditional `idiosyncrasy-based' analysis. I conclude that the verbs in the upper-field are exceptional in a `deeper' sense, in that they do not construct as ordinary syntactic heads. Instead they seem to behave more like functional elements as characterized by Abney (1987). On the basis of such a revised syntactic analysis most of the unexpected word order and verb form irregularities resurface as related regular properties.
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Bibtex entry:
@InProceedings{meurers:csli02,
author = {Walt Detmar Meurers},
title = {To flip or not to flip: On the nature of irregularities
in the German verbal complex},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar},
pages = {235--246},
year = 2002,
editor = {Van Eynde, Frank and Lars Hellan and Dorothee Beermann},
publisher = {CSLI Publications},
address = {Stanford, CA},
url = {http://purl.org/dm/papers/meuers-01.html}
}