Abhängige Sätze in einem fragebasierten Diskursmodell

Abstract

In this thesis, different types of dependent clauses will be investigated with respect to their behavior in a question-driven discourse model. It will be argued that one group of dependent clauses is conventionally marked as not-at-issue and therefore cannot express an information that is relevant to the current Question Under Discussion (QUD). Characteristic features of these dependent clauses are that they project under the scope of an entailment-cancelling operator and that they cannot be denied directly, what is going to be confirmed by the results of a questionary. In contrast, depending on the context, dependent clauses of the second group can express at-issue or not-at-issue content. Therefore, only a subset of the totality of dependent clauses can be used to answer the QUD. Interestingly, only dependent clauses that express at-issue content can undergo V2 movement in German, which is subsumed under the notion of Main Clause Phenomena. The licensing of V2 in German dependent clauses is typically explained in terms of presupposition and assertion. It is assumed that only asserted clauses can undergo V2 movement. In this thesis, however, I will show that the Assertion Hypothesis leads to wrong predictions. Instead of relying on assertional force, I will argue that V2 in German dependent clauses is an optional marker of at-issueness. The contrast between dependent clauses that can express at-issue content and those that cannot is going to be investigated in more detail by comparing temporal and causal clauses, whereas only the latter can be used to answer the current QUD. It will be argued that this contrast can be traced back to a fundamental difference between the semantic contribution of temporal and causal conjunctions: Whereas causal weil expresses a relation between two events,temporal conjunctions such as bevor or nachdem are non-relational. As one-place predicates they map their IP-complement to a time interval i which restricts the nuclear scope of an overt or covert quantifier. As quantifier restrictions, temporal clauses are subject to an existence presupposition and therefore cannot be used to express at-issue content.