Abstract This paper presents a theoretical approach to adjunct control in German and English participial clauses. Based on a corpus study of 1600 non-finite adverbial clauses with a participial head in German and English, we argue that there is a clear correlation between the syntactico-semantic scope of a participial adjunct and its control status: while adjuncts modifying the event generally display obligatory control (OC), adjuncts modifying the matrix proposition or utterance occur with non-obligatory control (NOC). To capture this theoretically, we analyse OC as an upward Agree relation between a matrix argument and PRO, as also suggested in other recent approaches to control. Since this Agree relation can only be established without further ado when the adjunct is in the c-command domain of a matrix argument, OC is restricted to adjuncts in the verbal domain. For adjuncts above T, an NOC relation is established, which is licensed by a salient perceiver or referent that is syntactically encoded in the C-domain. Thus, we argue that the syntactic height of an adjunct is crucial for its control status and that OC and NOC are generally in complementary distribution in adjuncts. However, in contrast to previous work, we suggest that the control relation is established phase-wise, which leaves room for a certain amount of flexibility if the first potential goal is not a suitable controller.

In determiner sharing, a quantifier may be omitted from a coordination in the context of another ellipsis. This paper proposes a novel analysis on the basis of new German data: determiner sharing arises from the interaction of clausal ellipsis and split topicalization. I show that the apparent parasitism of determiner sharing can be derived without any further assumptions. The success of this analysis supports Move-and-Delete approaches to ellipsis.

Heterofunctional Coordination (HC), in which conjuncts bear different grammatical functions (as in English What and whento eat to stay healthy), is assumed to be solely multiclausal in Germanic languages, i.e., to be underlyingly a coordination of clauses. This is supposed to distinguish Germanic from Slavic, where monoclausal HC is also possible, in which the surface conjuncts are coordinated directly. In the case of German, this assumption has not been supported by any empirical studies. This paper offers two such studies—based on corpora and on acceptability judgement experiments—which, however, do not confirm the assumption that German HC is strictly multiclausal. In particular, numerous examples of monoclausal HC constructions may be found in German corpora, while judgement experiments show a great variability of acceptance rates of monoclausal HC in German and demonstrate that the acceptability of such constructions depends on various factors. As this variability does not seem to reflect processing effects, we conclude that a gradient (non-binary) grammaticality approach is needed to model German HC. While the focus of this paper is on deriving the right empirical generalizations, we also include an appendix containing a proof-of-concept sketch of such a gradient grammaticality analysis, which builds on Minimalist Gradient Harmonic Grammar and on ideas from Linear Optimality Theory and the Decathlon Model.

DP-conjunctions with a mismatch in person features call for additional resolution rules to determine the values the agreement target has to copy. Across languages, resolution for person features typically follows a hierarchy of the form 1 ≻ 2 ≻ 3 —with some well-known exceptions, namely German and Dutch coordinations conjoining 2nd and 3rd person which allow for both agreement options. This paper takes a closer look at resolution agreement in German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. The German(ic) anomaly provides evidence for the presence of an underlying binary feature system and the need for set union as a resolution mechanism. The pattern is derived within the framework of Distributed Morphology where vocabulary insertion happens late and is thereby sensitive to decomposed and unified feature sets. Crucial for the account is an independently motivated impoverishment rule that tracks the absence of 1st person inclusive exponents in Germanic.

A generalization that has emerged in the literature on verb clusters in West Germanic languages is that so-called 2-1-3 orders (where verb n selects verb n+1) are absent with core clustering verbs. In this paper we show that Dutch permits 2-1-3 order as an optional variant of the more widely acknowledged 1-2-3 order. The 2-1-3 order is subject to a range of restrictions involving the lexical items in the cluster, the morphological form of these items, whether other elements intervene, and where focus is placed. We argue that these restrictions are best understood if the 2-1-3 order is derived from an underlying 1-2-3 cluster through a post-syntactic inversion rule. This rule shares various properties with other inversion rules but cannot be reduced entirely to a familiar rule type.

This paper argues in favor of the hypothesis that there are two definite articles in natural language, a weak article which expresses uniqueness and a strong article which expresses anaphoricity. The study is based on the distribution of definite articles in Icelandic, and they are found to alternate along the same empirical dimension as weak and strong articles in German. Furthermore, the Icelandic pattern manifests a structural interaction which is similar to English do-support, and we refer to it as the-support. We argue that the similarities between do-support and the-support suggest that studies of the two phenomena can benefit from considering them to be related at a deep abstract level. Thus, consequences ensue for the theory of suffixation under adjecency.

Long extraction, that is, the displacement of a constituent across a clause boundary, is considered a process of broad applicability. This view is challenged by the claim that extracting a phrase from a that-clause into a relative clause is ungrammatical in German. Since the evidence for this claim is extremely limited, we ran three acceptability experiments investigating long extraction in German. As expected from a large range of studies on long extraction in German, long extraction was judged as less acceptable than corresponding sentences without long extraction. Importantly, long extraction was equally acceptable across the three contexts that were tested—relative clauses, embedded questions and main clause questions. Our experiments, thus, show that long extraction applies across different structural contexts in German, as expected if long extraction is a general syntactic process. In addition, this paper presents new evidence concerning the sources of individual variation with regard to the acceptability of long extraction. First, we confirm that long extraction gets less acceptable when going from the South to the North of the German speaking area. Second, we tested whether individual participants differ with regard to how easily they accept non-standard constructions. To this end, we ran an additional experiment on verb-cluster formation, including sentences that are ungrammatical according to prescriptive grammar but that are, nevertheless, accepted by many speakers of German. The acceptability of long extraction correlates with the acceptability of non-standard verb clusters even when regional background is controlled for.

This paper presents a cross-dialectal study of grammatical gender in Norwegian nominal phrases. Specifically, we investigate the decline of the feminine gender in three age groups across seven different dialects. The dialects vary in their morphological richness of gender marking: some dialects traditionally have more distinctive marking of the feminine gender. With an elicited production experiment, we investigate gender marking on the indefinite determiner and the definite suffix. We find that feminine gender is in decline in all dialects, but there are clear differences between the locations and between age groups. The feminine indefinite determiner ei is replaced by the masculine en at different rates and to a different degree in the various dialects. We furthermore find that the feminine definite suffix -a is retained in all locations except for Stavanger. We argue that the decline of the feminine gender can be explained by an interplay between the morphological richness of the given dialect and dialect contact. The former helps to retain the feminine as a separate category, while the latter accelerates the loss of the feminine.

This paper investigates the properties of nominal phrases and demonstratives used as verbal anaphora in Norwegian, Danish, English, and Scots-English, e.g. English Can John make good curry? – That he can; Norwegian Anja ligger godt an, det samme gjør Madelène lit. ‘Anja is in a good position, Madelène does the same [thing]’. Following Lødrup (Proceedings of NELS 24, 1994), Houser et al. (Proceedings of WECOL 34, 2007), Bentzen et al. (J Comp Ger Linguist 16:91–125, 2013), these anaphoric expressions are argued to be surface anaphora and to conceal elided vPs. Contrary to previous analyses, the nominal phrases are argued to themselves be contributing meaning beyond the vPs they conceal; they are argued to be overt background arguments for an ellipsis-licensing head with semantics similar to Rooth’s ∼ operator (Nat Lang Semant 1(1):75–116, 1992). The paper also explores cross-linguistic variation in the discourse/antecedence conditions on such anaphora, and their fronting behavior. In Danish and (general) English, such anaphora must generally topicalize, whereas in Norwegian and Scots-English, they can more freely appear in situ (in post-auxiliary position). Developing Mikkelsen’s (J Linguist 51(3):595–643, 2015) analysis of Danish det, this behavior is encoded as a feature [uTop] which must be checked; Norwegian is argued to have more possibilities to check this feature in situ than Danish, while in Scots-English, that is argued to be a propositional anaphor, lacking the relevant feature.

In Alemannic dialects of German, [n] is particularly vulnerable to assimilation, deletion, and epenthesis. Although these changes are not necessarily uniform across all Alemannic varieties, the Alemannic dialect areas all exhibit some, if not all, of these processes. In this article, we present data from a diverse array of Alemannic dialects and show that [n] behaves similarly throughout Alemannic, assimilating to the place of following stops, deleting word-finally, and repairing hiatus through epenthesis. We contend that coronal [n] is interacting with so many processes because it is unmarked in terms of place and manner. This paper contributes to the phonological literature on dialectology and Markedness Theory. First, by considering similar processes which occur across multiple Alemannic dialects, we show how Alemannic prefers eliminating or modifying word-final [n]. Second, this analysis gives insight into theories of segment (un)markedness; thus, the data presented in this paper support descriptions of unmarked segments as undergoing assimilation, deletion, and epenthesis, while they challenge markedness accounts by scholars who bar [n] as an epenthetic segment. Third, we provide data for a language family in which one segment undergoes all three processes of assimilation, deletion, and epenthesis; this is unprecedented in the literature on unmarked segments, which typically focuses on languages which possess only one of these three processes.