430 Germanische Sprachen; Deutsch
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Sentence mood in German is a complex category that is determined by various components of the grammatical system. In particular, verbal mood, the position of the finite verb and the wh-characteristics of the so called 'Vorfeld'-phrase are responsible for the constitution of sentence mood in German. This article proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction between the pronominal binding of indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analyzed as choice functions. It is shown that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. The various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites can be derived by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions.
In this paper, a class of sentences in German is discussed that are often called whexclamatives. […]
So called wh-exclamatives can be roughly characterized as wh-clauses that are embedded under exclamative predicates like erstaunt sein/to be amazed at [...] or that are used as the basis for an exclamation [...].
One can ask if wh-exclamatives are a clause-type of their own, in particular, whether they are different from wh-clauses in question environments, that is under question predicates like to ask or to wonder or used as questions. It is often assumed that wh-clauses in exclamative contexts, both embedded and unembedded, are indeed different from wh-clauses in interrogative or question environments [...], at least regarding their semantical type, see for example Elliot (1971, 1974), Grimshaw (1979, 1981), Zaefferer (1983, 1984), Altmann (1 987, 1993). […]
I assume with Grimshaw (1979) that so called wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives are alike with respect to their syntactical properties. In addition, I think that they are also alike semantically. So, what I like to do here is to evaluate the following hypothesis:
So-called wh-exclamatives are of the same semantical type as wh-interrogatives.
Two main types of sentences are traditionally distinguished in the context of semantic theories of questions and answers: declarative sentences, corresponding to statements, and interrogative sentences, corresponding to questions. The interrogative forms can be further subdivided into dialectical ones (yes-no-questions) and non-dialectical ones (constituent questions). These distinctions are made for both root and embedded sentences. The predicates that select sentential complements fall into three classes: predicates that license only declaratives, those that allow only for interrogatives, and those that embed both types of sentences. In this connection, verbs of doubt are interesting in that they allow for declaratives as well as dialectical interrogatives, while non-dialectical interrogatives do not seem to be appropriate complements.
In what follows, our main concern will be with the German verb of doubt zweifeln and its possible sentential complements. Speaker intuitions as to which constructions are grammatical or acceptable vary, particularily with respect to rare expressions like zweifeln. Therefore, interviews and corpus analysis were applied as a means to acquire reliable linguistic data. These as well as data from historical sources and from some languages other than German (esp. English and Italian) are presented and analysed. In the last section, based on the notion of ‘subjective probability’, an attempt is made at explaining the observations.