Positional effects in a monostratal grammar of German

Abstract

This study examines the notion of syntactic position as it is manifested in German. Transformational approaches standardly rely on configurational notions such as specifier or head for positional effects. A closer investigation of German subordinate structures finds the standard positional dichotomy between heads and specifiers wanting. At the same time, the distributional facts strongly argue for an explicit recognition of the notion of syntactic position, albeit one that is not based on tree-configurational notions, but instead in terms of linearly defined classes of distribution among constituents within the clause. Finally it is argued that this approach provides the basis for characterizing clause types which naturally generalizes over different immediate dominance relations.