Licensing conditions for Verb-Third clauses in the history of German

Matrix clauses in which the left-peripheral preverbal area (the prefield) is occupied by multiple constituents, so-called ‘Verb-Third clauses’, have been attested throughout the history of the German language and are still highly productive in Present-Day German. These structures represent a puzzle for both synchronic and diachronic syntactic research, since they challenge the mainstream view that in declarative main predicates the finite verb is obligatorily raised to C° and surfaces in second clause position, and that this constraint has been established since Middle High German. Although such configurations have been extensively investigated in the last decades, the idea of a historical continuity of this syntactic pattern has not met with widespread acceptance in the literature. Instead, it is generally assumed that the older attestations of Verb-Third clauses do not result from the same operations as in contemporary German and are to be intended as instantiations of another grammatical system that was subjected to language change, so that the older and the more recent attestations cannot be compared. In this project, the idea is pursued that the modern Verb-Third construction is the result of a historically continuous construct whose licensing conditions have been diachronically rearranged without implying a dramatic change in clause structure.

DFG Funding

This project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Project number: 376919537. Duration: 11/2017—10/2020.