TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bader, Markus
A1  - Portele, Yvonne
T1  - Discourse and form constraints on licensing object-first sentences in German
T2  - Languages
N2  - In German, the subject usually precedes the object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, the object is allowed to precede the subject (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either the subject or a discourse-given object occurs in clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with a given object are generally acceptable, but the precise degree of acceptability varies both with the object‘s referential form (demonstrative objects leading to higher acceptability than other types of objects) and with formal properties of the subject (pronominal subjects leading to higher acceptability than non-pronominal subjects). For SO sentences, acceptability was reduced when the object was a d-pronoun, which contrasts with the high acceptability of OS sentences with a d-pronoun object. This finding was explored in a third acceptability experiment comparing d-pronouns in subject and object function. This experiment provides evidence that a reduction in acceptability due to a prescriptive bias against d-pronouns is suspended when the d-pronoun occurs as object in the prefield. We discuss the experimental results with respect to theories of German clause structure that claim that OS sentences with different information-structural properties are derived by different types of movement.
KW  - word order
KW  - givenness
KW  - topic
KW  - referential expression
KW  - German
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/61188
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-611882
SN  - 2226-471X
VL  - 6
IS  - 2, art. 82
SP  - 1
EP  - 28
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -