When the subject follows the object. On a curiosity in the syntax of personal pronouns in some German dialects

Abstract

In this paper, I present new data from several German dialects concerning the order of pronominal subjects and objects. The data are taken from three sources (Wenker survey, Bavarian Linguistic Atlas, Syntax of Hessian Dialects) and cover a time span of nearly 150 years, thus providing a very robust empirical basis. Although the canonical order in all German varieties is subject before object and this serialization holds for pronominal as well as for non-pronominal arguments, a certain proportiom of reverse orders for pronouns is attested in all three data sources. That is, there are speakers of various dialectal varieties who prefer object before subject as the unmarked order of pronouns (e.g., haben dir sie geholfen lit. ‘have you they helped’). I will try to explain the emergence of the reverse order adopting the null subject cycle (NSC) proposed by Fus and Wratil (2013) as a point of departure and modifying it into a more general pronoun cycle (PC): The PC implies the development of reduced pronouns out of full ones, which then replace clitic or null pronouns (depending on the person and number combination). The reverse order comprises the steps in the cycle where a clitic or a null subject pronoun is replaced with a reduced subject pronoun out of which eventually a clitic pronoun evolves. The reduced subject pronoun follows the object clitic as the clitic subject does as well for a short period of time before it is placed again before the object clitic. In the concluding section I discuss the observable mismatch between morphological paradigms and the syntactic level, in that syntax requires a tripartite distinction for which morphology mostly provides only two distinct forms.