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This article compares two alternatives to the standard movement-and-deletion approach to clausal ellipsis, which postulates deletion of TP after the remnants of ellipsis are (sometimes exceptionally) A′-moved into the left periphery of the clause. One alternative is the in-situ approach, which denies the involvement of movement in the derivation of clausal ellipsis; it claims that clausal ellipsis can apply to any run-of-the-mill syntactic structure and simply deletes the familiar/given information from the propositional domain of the clause. Another alternative is the selective spell-out approach; it denies the involvement of deletion and states that the remnants undergo regular A′-movement into the specifiers of specific semantically relevant functional projections (CP, FocusP, NegP, etc.), which are subsequently selected for spell-out. This article argues that the selective spell-out approach is superior to the two deletion approaches.

In this chapter, it is shown that finite verbs which are attracted by Verb-Second (V2) movement are reconstructed into their base position for interpretation. In fact, the lexical part of the finite verb is never interpreted in its fronted position. We present two groups of empirical findings which strongly support this conclusion. The first group provides grammar-internal evidence for reconstruction, the second group shows that the verb’s reconstruction can also be traced in the process of human sentence comprehension. The German verb brauchen, which happens to be a negative polarity item and thus needs to be interpreted in the scope of negation, provides evidence for the reconstruction process in on-line comprehension. Our discussion is embedded in a review of sentence processing in German. It is shown how processing can be efficient despite the fact that the verb’s semantic contribution may be delayed. Our account of V2 in grammar and parsing supports a rather tight link between the competence grammar and the dynamics of sentence processing. published

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In progressive Case attraction, the Case of a head nominal overwrites the Case of a following coindexed relative pronoun. The reverse process is called ‘inverse’ Case attraction. There, the morphologically overt Case of a relative pronoun overwrites the Case of a preceding head nominal. Inverse Case attraction has been attested in languages like Ancient Greek, Latin, and in the history of different Germanic languages. For modern standard German, its existence has in general been denied. We first discuss current analyses which have nevertheless identified inverse Case attraction in modern German on the basis of historical data and experimental judgement studies. We then present four behavioral experiments on the processing of German sentences. Effects of inverse Case attraction in the comprehension of German are revealed in self-paced reading times. They are fundamentally different in structures allowing attraction of dative Case than in structures allowing attraction of accusative Case, with much stronger effects for dative than for accusative Case. The results are interpreted in a theory of Case that draws a syntactic difference between structural and inherent (‘lexical’) Case rather than along the lines of the familiar Case hierarchy. published

The goal of this article is to explore the structure of the clausal 'left periphery' with respect to a phe- nomenon that has so far only rarely been identified as a root clause phenomenon: Emphatic topicalization (ET). It is a form of movement by which a phrase (not necessarily a wh-phrase) targets the specifier of a complemen- tizer. This movement prevents the CP-complement from remaining in its embedded position. For convergence, the entire CP in which ET has applied must move to the left periphery of the clause that immediately dominates it. It is argued that this latter move is necessary because ET induces a feature that is only interpretable in the domain of illocutionary force, illocutionary force being a property of the utterance i.e. typically of the root clause. The data of this study come from the Bavarian dialect of German (Germanic) and from Bangla (Indo- Aryan). In spite of the differences between these two languages, the similarity of the constraints which are re- vealed by this study cannot be accidental. For Bangla, a typical "wh-in-situ language", it is shown that the syn- tax of ET-scope is to a large extent parallel to the syntax of wh-scope. Thus, the syntax of wh-scope can be ar- gued to follow from general properties of the parametric choices made in Bangla (and perhaps in closely related languages).

In this chapter, it will be shown that in the grammar of German, discourse as well as focus particles are part of the functional structure of the clause, and that in the unmarked case both types of particles take scope exactly where they are merged. Their scope must not be changed in the ongoing derivation. In other words, they are “frozen in place”. A challenge comes from those cases in which particles form constituents with sub-sentential phrases such as my bike or in which village, i.e. phrases which do not qualify as scope domains. While co-constituency with sub-sentential phrases is a widely known property of focus particles, corresponding constellations with discourse particles are less widely known and therefore more challenging. Due to this, the focus of the chapter will be on discourse particles. In part 1, I will present what I take to be the current base-line of a syntactic-semantic representation of discourse particles (in German and hopefully beyond). Part 2 develops an account of discourse particles in wh-questions and their dependence on interrogative force. Part 3 shows how discourse particles can directly combine with wh-phrases, and how the movement of phrases that are composed in such a way and their scope properties can be integrated into the account developed in part 2. Importantly, I will show that their scope freezes in a position lower than the position seen in surface structure. This finding defines the goal of our consideration of focus particles. Part 4 integrates focus particles and shows that the analysis gets close to a unified account of focus particles and discourse particles. The perspective and advantage of a unified theory of particles is commented on in section 5. Section 6 draws some conclusions. published

Five sets of linguistic data from different languages (Bangla, German, Romanian, Turkish) are discussed all of which present us with morpho-syntactic repair processes and concomitant irregularity in semantic interpretation. It is argued that this coincidence cannot be accidental, and that there is a rationale behind the apparently paradoxical situation. This rationale seems to be that satisfaction of formal requirements of the grammar has primacy over semantic interpretation. Semantic interpretation can only succeed if the formal composition (merge) involves lexical atoms that are drawn from sets of alternatives. These alternatives seem to be lacking in repair processes. The lexical atoms that are used in fixing up structure are defaults and as such without peers. The consequence is a priority of form over meaning. A more remote consequence is that it would be difficult to defend a grammar-independent language of thought because such a language would almost necessarily rest on semantic or conceptual atoms and not on the formal devices which are at work in the cases at hand. published

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This article presents novel evidence for cyclic wh-movement. Two experiments show that the question-sensitive particle denn in German is more readily accepted when occurring in an independent interrogative clause than in a dependent clause embedded in a wh-question. Importantly, however, acceptance of denn in a dependent clause increases significantly when a wh-phrase has been moved out of that clause. We argue that denn is locally licensed by an interrogative Force head. In dependent clauses, this licensing can be mediated by long wh-movement leaving a transient representation of interrogative force in Spec,CP. Without such a mediating trace in Spec,CP, the licensing of the particle fails. In conclusion, denn in a dependent clause indicates cyclic wh-movement.

The topic of the following article is an exceptional use of the negative quantifier nothing and its correspondents in German, Dutch and Italian in which this element turns out to act like a negative polarity item (NPI). The circumstances under which this is the case have very briefly been described in Bayer (2006). Nothing is interpreted like an NPI whenever it is not licensed as an argument. Closer inspection reveals that adjunct status alone is too coarse a distinction, and that nothing must in fact be associated with the structural object position of the verb. The article is organized as follows. Section 1 presents the key observation using English data. Sections 2, 3 and 4 present constructed as well as attested data from English, German and Dutch respectively. Section 5 contains considerations of argument structures which trigger the interpretation of nothing as an NPI. Section 6 presents the core account. Section 7 sketches a diachronic scenario. Section 8 turns to negative concord and expands the account to Italian data. Section 9 contains a conclusion.

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German discourse particles are known to appear in clause-medial position and to resist displacement to the left or to the right. Nevertheless, there seems to be an exception: discourse particles in interrogatives can be moved to the left as a consequence of forming a constituent with a wh -phrase. In this paper, we focus on such cases of co-constituency of discourse particles and wh -elements in German wh -questions. We propose a successive-cyclic movement account for their distribution. Relying on the combination of key aspects of the Minimalist Program, we present a derivational model that also accounts for cases of stacked particles as they may appear in the left clausal periphery. We then turn to the interpretation of these configurations. In comparison with constructions in which the particle stays in situ, we notice an interpretive distinctness that requires the notion of emphasis for intensity to account for the extra pragmatic effect that these left peripheral structures convey.

In this ERP study we investigate the processes that occur in syntactically ambiguous German sentences at the point of disambiguation. Whereas most psycholinguistic theories agree on the view that processing difficulties arise when parsing preferences are disconfirmed (so-called garden-path effects), important differences exist with respect to theoretical assumptions about the parser's recovery from a misparse. A key distinction can be made between parsers that compute all alternative syntactic structures in parallel (parallel parsers) and parsers that compute only a single preferred analysis (serial parsers). To distinguish empirically between parallel and serial parsing models, we compare ERP responses to garden-path sentences with ERP responses to truly ungrammatical sentences. Garden-path sentences contain a temporary and ultimately curable ungrammaticality, whereas truly ungrammatical sentences remain so permanently--a difference which gives rise to different predictions in the two classes of parsing architectures. At the disambiguating word, ERPs in both sentence types show negative shifts of similar onset latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution in an initial time window between 300 and 500 ms. In a following time window (500-700 ms), the negative shift to garden-path sentences disappears at right central parietal sites, while it continues in permanently ungrammatical sentences. These data are taken as evidence for a strictly serial parser. The absence of a difference in the early time window indicates that temporary and permanent ungrammaticalities trigger the same kind of parsing responses. Later differences can be related to successful reanalysis in garden-path but not in ungrammatical sentences.

Wh-movement is less uniform than suggested by the standard theory of generative grammar. Bavarian provides evidence that word-size wh-operators have syntactic as well as phonological properties of functional heads rather than genuine phrases. At the core of the analysis is the intuition that wh-words embrace the role of the complementizer, and that as a consequence merger of a separate complementizer is suspended. Theoretical reasoning which comes to this conclusion is suggested by judgment as well as production experiments with native speakers of the language. It is argued that from the economy-driven perspective of minimalist syntax, head-style wh-movement, as supported by Bavarian syntax, should actually be the preferred choice.

In German, oblique Cases (dative and genitive) require morphological licensing while structural Cases (nominative and accusative) do not. This difference can be captured by assuming that in German, NPs bearing oblique Case have an extra structural layer Kase phrase (KP) which is missing in NPs bearing structural Case. Focusing on dative NPs, we will show that the postulation of such a phrase-structural difference between oblique and structural case allows for a unified explanation of a wide array of facts both from the domain of grammar and from the domain of language comprehension. First, with regard to grammar, several asymmetries between dative NPs and nominative/accusative NPs follow if the former but not the latter are included within a KP-shell, including asymmetries with respect to function changing operations, clausal licensing, binding and topic drop, among others. Corroborating evidence for our analysis of dative Case in German will be provided by a comparison with data from English and Dutch. Second, when combined with certain independent assumptions about the human sentence parsing mechanism, the postulation of a KP for datives helps explain several recent experimental findings with respect to on-line sentence understanding, including the facts that dative case is dispreferred in situations of local syntactic ambiguity and that dative case may erroneously override structural case during sentence comprehension but not vice versa.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the last decade's psycholinguistic research on how syntactic functions are assigned during on-line language comprehension in German. In a language like German, the assignment of syntactic functions is not an easy task due to the pervasive morphological syncretism within the nominal System. Inspired by the work of Frazier (1987) on Dutch, research on German started with the question as to how the parser copes with ambiguous filler-gap dependencies in subject-object ambiguities. Work on this question quickly established a rather general subject-object preference in German subject-object ambiguities. Having established such a subject-object preference, several new lines of research emerged. We will review the three major lines that are currently in the focus of interest: (i) Besides subject-object ambiguities involving filler-gap dependencies, there are subject-object as well as object-object ambiguities which are only ambiguous with respect to case assignment. When these latter kinds of ambiguities where included in experimental studies, it soon became clear that case features play a role which cannot be reduced to phrase-structural configurations. (ii) Garden-path effects that are found when a locally ambiguous sentence is disambiguated in favor of a non-preferred reading have been shown to differ widely in strength. Investigating why this is so is now a major topic both in psycholinguistics in general and in experimental work on German in particular. (iii) The finding of subject-object-preferences might at least in certain cases be due to semantic/pragmatic factors instead of syntactic ones. Several experiments have now been conducted which manipulated some semantic/pragmatic property of test Stimuli in order to disentangle syntactic from semantic/pragmatic contributions to observable preferences.

In this paper we discuss an asymmetry in the Case system of German and its implications for human sentence processing: the asymmetry between nominative/accusative and dative case. Starting from the assumption that dative case has a distinct grammatical representation--dative DPs are embedded into an extra structural layer KP--the results of two experiments will be presented, which show that dative assignment during reanalysis is accompanied by additional processing operations that are not needed when accusative or nominative are assigned. In particular, we show that dative assignment during reanalysis triggers reaccess to the mental lexicon, giving rise to greater processing difficulty. We conclude with a discussion of empirical and theoretical consequences of our findings.

Recent developments in syntactic theory suggest that phrase structure is cross-linguistically more uniform than assumed so far, and that the order spec-head-complement may be the only permissible one. The present article takes issue with this view, showing that the derivation of final complementizers from initial ones by means of IP-raising faces serious difficulties. The discussion focuses on Bengali and similar languages which may be called ‘hybrid’ because both orders, IP-C as well as C-IP, are attested. Five arguments are raised which indicate that these orders are not derivationally connected. The discussion bears results which may also be of interest for linguistic typology, language change and acquisition.

In an ERP study, German sentences were investigated that contain a case-ambiguous NP that may be assigned accusative or dative case. Sentences were disambiguated by the verb in final position of the sentence. As our data show, sentences ending in a verb that assigns dative case to the ambiguous NP elicit a clear garden-path effect. The garden-path effect was indicated by a broad centro-posterior negative shift that occurred between 300 and 900 msec after the dative-assigning verb was presented. No enhanced P600 following the misanalysis was observed. Noun phrases whose case ambiguity was resolved in favor of accusative case and unambiguously dative-marked NPs did not trigger significant ERP differences. We will discuss the implications of our results for parsing and its neuropsychological correlates. The results of this study support a parser design according to which the so-called structural case (nominative or accusative) is assigned without any delay in the absence of morpho-lexical counterevidence. It is argued that the enhancement of a negative ERP component with a ficlassicalfl N400 topography refiects the difficulty of reanalysis due to reaccessing morpho-lexical information that lies outside the domain of the parsing module. Consequently, ERP responses to garden-path effects are not confined to a late positivity but vary depending on the level of processing involved in reanalysis. The fact that garden-path effects may also elicit an N400 can be linked to the nonhomogeneous linguistic properties of the constructions from which they arise.

At the turn of the century, the study of agrammatism started in German aphasiology with the introduction of syntax as an object of research in linguistics and the psychology of language. The disorder descriptively known as agrammatism was originally thought to arise from multiple origins, at the level of syntactic word order, of function word insertion, of grammaticalization by means of morphology, or as an impairment of processing. In modern aphasiology, there have been several attempts to reduce agrammatism to a single cause, such as the loss of specific syntactic operations or a deficit in morpholexical access. This article summarizes the results of morpholexical and morphosyntactic experiments with two German and two Italian agrammatic patients. The cross-language data reveal far more inflectional abilities than is usually assumed for agrammatism. Furthermore, they strongly support characterizations of the disorder as a syntactic rather than a morpholexical deficit.

Discourse particles provide important clues to our understanding of the s yntax-to-discourse relation. They are sensitive to sentence types and utterance contexts. As such they seem to contribute to the determination of illocutionary force. After providing some general background information on discourse particles, the present article focuses on the role of discourse particles in German constituent questions. Syntactic evidence is provided which s uggests that they are pre-VP functional heads which can to some extent be stacked. It is shown how the particles under consideration can access the force system, and how this access can proceed even in cases in which they occur in embedded clauses. After providing the basic architecture, we investigate the role of these particles in “special questions”, questions which are not interpreted as simple requests for information. The syntactic discussion is then extended to cases in which the discourse particle forms a constituent with a wh-phrase – [wh+Prt] – , as well as to cases in which this constituent interacts with particles in pre-VP position. The [wh+Prt] construction offers important evidence both in favor of the head status of the particles under investigation and in favor 1. We are grateful to Ellen Brandner, Anne Breitbarth, Anna Cardinaletti, Probal Dasgupta, Franziska Hack, Liliane Haegeman, Sibansu Mukhopadhyaya, Cecilia Poletto, Volker Struckmeier, Sten Vikner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments, to the editors of this special issue, to Daniel Burkle for editorial assistance, and very much also to Harry van der Hulst for his assistance. We also wish to thank the audiences of the Workshop on Particles, Cambridge, 30 –31 October 2008 and of the Workshop The fine structure of clause types (F ederation Typologie et universaux linguistiques/TUL, CNRS), Paris, 28–29 November 2008. The usual disclaimers apply. The two authors were members of the research program Clause Types – Cartography and Typology (2006 –2009) of the Federation TUL, which has supported this research. We also received support from the Konstanz SFB 471 which is gratefully acknowledged.

1. IntroductionThough the term wh-in-situ was not coined until the1980’s (Aoun et al. 1981), properties of wh-in-situ havebeen investigated since the 60’s. It is by now a familiarfact that Chinese wh-questions, as well as multiplequestions in English, contain in-situ wh-words, i.e., whwords that do not undergo overt wh-movement, as in(1), in contrast with (2).(1) a. Who bought what?b. Hufei mai-le shenme (Mandarin Chinese)Hufei buy

1. Acknowledgements 2. Introduction (by Bayer, Josef) 3. Clause Structure 4. What is 'Argument Sharing'?: A Case Study on Argument Sharing under VP-Serialization in Oriya (by Beermann, Dorothee) 5. Pseudoclefts: a Fully Derivational Account (by Boeckx, Cedric) 6. The Cleft Question and the Question of Cleft (by Madhavan, P.) 7. Clausal Pied-piping and Subjacency (by Srikumar, K.) 8. Modification in DP 9. On the Syntax of Quantity in English (by Kayne, Richard S.) 10. Binding 11. Coreference Violations 'Beyond Principle B' (by Gueron, Jacqueline) 12. Perspectives on Binding (by Reuland, Eric J.) 13. Raising from a Tensed Clause and Linguistic Theory: Evidence from Maithili (by Yadava, Yogendra P.) 14. Complementizers and Complementation 15. The Ubiquitous Complementizer (by Dasgupta, Probal) 16. Word Order, Parameters, and the Extended COMP Projection (by Davison, Alice) 17. The Particle ne in Direct yes-no Questions (by Barbora, Madhumita) 18. Phonology 19. Underspecification and the Phonology of *NC -Effects in Malayalam (by Das, Shyamal) 20. The Disyllabic Word Minimum: Variations on a Theme in Bangla, Punjabi and Tamil (by Vijayakrishnan, K.G.) 21. Writing Systems and Phonological Awareness (by Sailaja, Pingali) 22. List of contributors 23. Bibliography of K.A. Jayaseelan 24. Index of names 25. Index of languages 26. Index of topics

The standard view about the uniformity of Case assignment by verbs and prepositions is challenged with data from German and an analysis according to which P has a feature structure which involves a Case feature that may not only participate in Case checking but may supply the Case that is missing in the complement of P. Adopting a probe/goal relation of agreement a fair number of peculiarities of the syntax of PPs can be explained such as obligatory pied piping, semantic selection, copy movement, operator scope and the role of adverbial proforms in pronominal PPs. Finally, the asymmetry in Case assignment between V and P is supported by novel data from sentence processing.