German partial VP fronting
Bibliographical information
This paper was written in August 1997. It has never been published and I have abandoned work on the topic as a non-native speaker in an area where native speakers disagree about the facts.
Abstract
As in English, German allows a VP to be topicalised (fronted), but unlike English, this VP can leave some or all of its dependents behind in the `Mittelfeld'; e.g. "Trinken darf er Kaffee", *`Drink may he coffee'. The pattern is standardly called `Partial VP Fronting' (PVPF), and there have been numerous suggestions for analyses using either GB/MP or HPSG. To the extent that these analyses are successful it is because they find ways to reduce the effect of PS (by invoking scrambling or structure-sharing). I offer a WG analysis which covers almost all of the facts, including a treatment of co-fronted subjects as in "Eine Concorde gelandet ist hier noch nie", `A Concorde landed is here still never'. Co-fronted subjects are particularly challenging because they require a `lowering' analysis and two constraints on semantic phrasing.