This paper argues that German je-desto-sentences are regular verb-second structures. Unlike left-dislocation(-like) structures (such as wenn-dann-clauses or free relative clause constructions with case mis-match and resumption), je-desto-strings are normal, regular prefield structures. A proposal from the literature is developed further, accord-ing to which je-clauses, like relative clauses, belong structurally to the clausal constituent into which they are integrated. The head of these constituents remains in its canonical middle field position, whereas relative as well as je-clauses usually extrapose to the right. If the host constituent is moved to the prefield, the attributive clause is carried along with it, with the je-clause realized initially and the relative clause usually finally. However, relatives may also precede their head noun. Such an analysis highlights the common features of clause types that are otherwise treated as fundamentally distinct from one another, without denying the differences and postulating construction-specific verb-third realizations. In addition, various other realization options are discussed and dismissed as grammatical illusions.*

The current article explores the distribution of PP-adverbs, such as this month, this year etc., within English determiner phrases. Examples extracted from English newspapers show that PP-adverbs surprisingly separate head nouns from their PP-complements (i.e. of-phrases), e.g. the election this month of the first female president. At other times, PP-adverbs follow PP-complements, e.g. the election of the first female president this month. Assuming that these PP-adverbs have a null preposition (Larson 1985; McCawley 1988; Caponigro & Pearl 2008, 2009; Shun'ichiro 2013), I put forward three possible syntactic analyses to account for the examples above: (i) adjunction of both the PP-complement and the PP-adverb; (ii) leftward movement of the head noun or the noun phrase; and (iii) rightward movement of the PP-complement. Following Stowell (1981), Higginbotham (1983) and Anderson (1984), the adjunction proposal argues that both PP-adverbs and of-phrases are adjuncts, thus being freely ordered in the nominal hierarchy (Bresnan 1982; Svenonius 1994; Stroik & Putnam 2013). In contrast, the leftward movement analysis respects Kayne's (1994) Antisymmetric Theory of Linearization and argues that the of-phrase in the examples above is still a genuine complement, but the head noun, or sometimes the noun phrase, moves leftwards to a position higher than spec,FP where PP-adverbs are situated. As for the rightward movement account, it follows the leftward movement in treating the of-phrase as a complement but differs in that it extraposes the PP-complement outside PP-adverbs and right-adjoins it inside the DP. The article shows that the first two proposals are untenable, and sometimes cannot derive the wanted data. The third account is superior in that it accounts for the required data as well as other island-sensitive facts.

The aim of this corpus-based study is to offer a syntactic and semantic characterization of sentences whose formal realization can be schematized as it + take + NP + (NP) + to-VP. The examination of the data suggests that this linear structure is shared by two distinct micro-constructions with different semantic properties: a construction with extraposition whose primary meaning is described in terms of consumption and an impersonal micro-construction which is analyzed as an anankastic construction expressing a necessary condition. It is shown that the apparently erratic grammatical behaviour of the string results from the existence in the hierarchical network of constructions of two different micro-constructions with similar formal realizations.