A Note on Misplaced or Wrongly Attachedzuin German

Oliver Schallert

doi:10.1017/s1470542719000138

Abstract

This paper deals with the misplacement of the infinitival markerzu‘to’ in German. While this phenomenon only occurs in certain config-urations in the standard language, such as auxiliary fronting, it is common in dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. I discuss the misplacement ofzuin Standard German due to auxiliary fronting, as well as other types ofzu-misplacement found in dialects. I propose two parsimonious options for the analysis of the standard language as well as dialect cases, namely, i) precedence rules and ii) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985). I show that even though the first approach has its merits, the second one is more advantageous.*

Highlights

One of the more memorable quotes by Thorsten Legat, a German exfootball professional notorious for his clumsy style of speaking, goes like this: Es ist einfach ’ne Faszination, hier zu sein zu dürfen
This paper had two main goals: On the empirical level, I showed that the discussion about zu ‘to’ and its cognates in other West Germanic languages suffers from the deficit that not all relevant data are taken into consideration
As the reviewer suggests, the regularity itself might be wired quite deeply into the grammar: “Shouldn’t we assume that the rules that emerge in such a situation are very general rules of UG?” I think this idea fits in with the characterization of exploratory expressions as “expressions which are introduced through the ordinary operation of the grammar” (Harris & Campbell 1995:73), that is, they can be seen as an additional window into the workings of grammatical systems

Summary

A Note on Misplaced or Wrongly Attached zu in German

This paper deals with the misplacement of the infinitival marker zu ‘to’ in German. While this phenomenon only occurs in certain configurations in the standard language, such as auxiliary fronting, it is common in dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. I discuss the misplacement of zu in Standard German due to auxiliary fronting, as well as other types of zu-misplacement found in dialects. I propose two parsimonious options for the analysis of the standard language as well as dialect cases, namely, i) precedence rules and ii) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985).

Introduction

44 Schallert

Conclusion