The position of adverbials in German clause structure: on the interaction of global and specific constraints

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tibor Kiss
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 332805149

Recent research assumes that order constraints for adverbials (PP, ADV) in German can be formulated in specific conditions for different adverbial classes. Syntactic arguments are only relevant as anchors, so that adverbial positions can be identified. While some researchers assume actual base positions, others propose that order constraints are only imposed relatively, i.e. between adverbials of different classes.Through the theoretical, corpus-based and experimental investigations in the first stage of this project, we have come to the conclusion that order constraints for adverbials should be defined as interactions between constraints specific for adverbials (as e.g. an anaphoricity condition on event-internal adverbials), and global constraints, i.e. constraints that hold equally well for arguments and adjuncts (as e.g. the condition that [+animate] precedes [–animate], which would hold for the nominal complement of an adverbial preposition).The investigations carried out also suggest new research venues for event-external and process-related adverbials. With regard to the former, the investigations of the first project stage cast doubt on the very concept of the adverbial class, since individual members show different word order preferences, and also appear in a variety of positions in front of and behind the subject and object. A possible reason might be that the class members chosen (temporal PPs and PPs of concomittant circumstance) cannot be classified as prototypes, another reason might have to do with the experimental design used. We thus propose a twofold extension of the analysis: on the one hand an extension of the adverbial class members, and on the other the introduction of an experimental design which allows the determination of preference with regard to the subject and object in the same setting. The investigation of process-related adverbials makes it clear that the different realisations (PPs, adverbs) must be included in a comprehensive analysis. Interestingly, the research tradition has focused on adverbs, while we have looked at PPs. For the second stage of this project, we thus propose an integrated treatment of process-related PPs and adverbs. In this way, we are also able to address a theoretical problem, viz. the use of operations, which yield different analyses for chain-identical structures. Such operations block empirical falisification strategies, because it might be possible to propose that it is 'always the other structure' that is relevant here. This problem is present not only in the analysis of process-related but also of event-external adverbials. Combining the diagnostics developed for the different classes, we are proposing an experimental design which should not only get across the falisification gap of chain-identical operations, but also yields a unified analysis of the order constraints for the adverbial classes on the basis of global and specific constraints.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants