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Scrambling in German – Extraction into the Mittelfeld

Author: Stefan Müller

Subject Areas: Nontransformational syntax of German, HPSG

German is a language with a relatively free word order. During the last few years considerable efforts have been made in all syntactic frameworks to explain so-called scrambling phenomena.

In the paper, I deal with some tough cases of German word order which cannot be described by assuming flat sentence structures or word order domains. The phenomena discussed are PP complements of nouns and adjectives, which can appear separated from their heads in the German Mittelfeld (1b), and stranded prepositions (2b). 

(1) a. [Von welcher Cousine]i hast du [ein Bild _i] ins      Photoalbum geklebt?
        of  which   cousin    have you a   picture  into.the album     sticked   
       `Of which cousin did you stick a picture into the album.'

    b. Ich habe [von Maria]i gestern   [ein Bild _i] ins      Photoalbum geklebt.
        I   have  of Maria   yesterday  a   picture into.the album      sticked
        `I have sticked a picture of Maria into the album yesterday.'

(2) a. [Da]i hat Karl [ein Argument [gegen _i]] vorgebracht.
    b. , daß [da]i Karl [ein Argument [gegen _i]] vorgebracht hat.
The similarity to fronting of these elements is used to explain these phenomena by a generalized version of the head-filler schema used in the standard HPSG framework.


A short version of the paper was presented at the tenth Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation in Hong Kong in 1995.

DFKI-Report 97-06 (24 pages)

PACLIC publication (5 pages):