OV/VO variation and information structure in Old Saxon and Middle Low German

Struik, Tara

PDF
gwalkden,+Struik__OV_VO_variation_and_information_structure_in_Old_Saxon_and_Middle_Low_German.pdf - Published
Download (213kB)

DOI:	https://doi.org/10.18148/hs/2022.v6i1.127
URL:	https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/hs/index.php/hs/art...
Additional URL:	https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358608424...
URN:	urn:nbn:de:bsz:180-madoc-634362
Document Type:	Article
Year of publication:	2022
The title of a journal, publication series:	Journal of Historical Syntax
Volume:	6
Issue number:	1
Page range:	1-36
Place of publication:	Konstanz
Publishing house:	Universität
Publication language:	English
Institution:	School of Humanities > Anglistik IV - Anglistische Linguistik/Diachronie (Trips 2006-)
Pre-existing license:	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Subject:	400 Language, linguistics 420 English
Abstract:	This paper discusses the syntactic status of OV/VO variation in Old Saxon and Middle Low German, a relatively understudied member of the West-Germanic language family. A comprehensive corpus study on Old Saxon and novel Middle Low German material shows that OV/VO variation is to a large extent governed by information structure and grammatical weight. The results indicate that Low German patterns with Dutch and German: given objects are predominantly preverbal, while new objects freely surface in postverbal position. While these observations might at first glance invite an analysis in terms of extraposition from an OV base, this paper argues specifically against this. Instead, it is argued that an antisymmetric analysis in which OV word order is derived from a VO base provides a better framework to account for the effect of information structure and weight on OV/VO variation.

	Das Dokument wird vom Publikationsserver der Universitätsbibliothek Mannheim bereitgestellt.
	Dieser Datensatz wurde nicht während einer Tätigkeit an der Universität Mannheim veröffentlicht, dies ist eine Externe Publikation.