The Licensing And Usage Of Topic Drop In German
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The licensing and usage of topic drop in German
Author: Lisa Schäfer
language: en
Publisher: Language Science Press
Release Date: 2025-06-10
This book is concerned with the licensing and usage of the elliptical construction topic drop in German. The term topic drop refers to the omission of the preverbal constituent in declarative verb-second sentences, for example, the omission of the subject ich (‘I’) in the sentence Bin gleich zurück (‘Am right back’). Topic drop exists in most of the Germanic verb-second languages and typically occurs in spoken language and text types such as SMS, chats, notes, etc. While much of the previous research has focused on individual specific properties of topic drop, often adopting a purely theoretical perspective, this book presents a systematic investigation of both the syntactic properties and usage conditions of topic drop based on empirical evidence from a corpus study and 12 acceptability rating studies. The first part of the book investigates the licensing of topic drop, in particular its restriction to the preverbal ‘prefield’ position. The results of four rating studies on topic drop in different prefield configurations lead to a refined prefield condition based on proposals by Rizzi (1994) and Freywald (2020) that is independent of topicality. Moreover, they inform the discussion on the most suitable syntactic analysis of topic drop, supporting a PF-deletion approach. The second part of the book presents and tests an information-theoretic account of topic drop usage that builds on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). In a corpus study and seven rating studies, several potential usage factors are investigated, including grammatical person and verb predictability. The results provide initial evidence suggesting that topic drop usage can be explained by general processing principles: The prefield constituent is omitted when it is redundant and realized overtly when it facilitates the processing of the following verb. This information-theoretic explanation is based on independently evidenced processing mechanisms, bundles isolated claims from the theoretical literature, and allows for a unified analysis of topic drop with other types of ellipsis and reduction.
The licensing and usage of topic drop in German
Author: Lisa Schäfer
language: en
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Release Date: 2025-06-10
This book is concerned with the licensing and usage of the elliptical construction topic drop in German. The term topic drop refers to the omission of the preverbal constituent in declarative verb-second sentences, for example, the omission of the subject ich (‘I’) in the sentence Bin gleich zurück (‘Am right back’). Topic drop exists in most of the Germanic verb-second languages and typically occurs in spoken language and text types such as SMS, chats, notes, etc. While much of the previous research has focused on individual specific properties of topic drop, often adopting a purely theoretical perspective, this book presents a systematic investigation of both the syntactic properties and usage conditions of topic drop based on empirical evidence from a corpus study and 12 acceptability rating studies. The first part of the book investigates the licensing of topic drop, in particular its restriction to the preverbal ‘prefield’ position. The results of four rating studies on topic drop in different prefield configurations lead to a refined prefield condition based on proposals by Rizzi (1994) and Freywald (2020) that is independent of topicality. Moreover, they inform the discussion on the most suitable syntactic analysis of topic drop, supporting a PF-deletion approach. The second part of the book presents and tests an information-theoretic account of topic drop usage that builds on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). In a corpus study and seven rating studies, several potential usage factors are investigated, including grammatical person and verb predictability. The results provide initial evidence suggesting that topic drop usage can be explained by general processing principles: The prefield constituent is omitted when it is redundant and realized overtly when it facilitates the processing of the following verb. This information-theoretic explanation is based on independently evidenced processing mechanisms, bundles isolated claims from the theoretical literature, and allows for a unified analysis of topic drop with other types of ellipsis and reduction.
Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic
Author: Ulrike Demske
language: en
Publisher: Language Science Press
Release Date: 2025-06-20
The volume Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic deals with questions of information structuring at discourse level, focusing on narrative discourses. More precisely, it is about the contribution of grammatical devices to the organization of texts as well as their diagnostic potential for the narrative text type. Although it is well-known that information packaging had a much greater impact on the distribution of grammatical patterns in historical stages of a language than it does today, so far many studies on the relationship between information structure and grammatical patterns do not go beyond the sentence level, in other words, they do not take into account the possible influence of the text type on the manifestation of certain grammatical patterns. How and to which degree changes in grammatical patterns correlate or are affected by changes in either discourse and/or narrative structure, how the two layers interact with each other and affect each other, and how such issues can be operationalized are still understudied. This volume aims to shed more light on these issues by presenting eight papers, which address these questions more or less explicitly. As the research questions imply, the papers all take a historical or diachronic perspective. Another commonality between the studies is that they all focus on data from Germanic languages, as we assume that by comparing closely related languages, the relationships in question become more pronounced. Specifically, the languages in question are German, Dutch, English and Icelandic. Understandably, the contributions in this volume can only highlight some aspects of the complex relationship between grammar and narration(s). Addressing among others questions of narrative progression, temporal structure, reference tracking and discourse functions, the contributions discuss phenomena such as temporal adverbials at the left periphery as well as later in the clause, left dislocation structures, fronting of the finite verb in dependent and independent clauses, linguistic means to express aspectual and tense information, and the distribution of nominalization patterns across text types.