German V2 and Doubly Filled COMP in West Germanic

On Wh-Head-Movement and the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter

The Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter (DFCF) of the type *[CP WH that] is known to be fully operative in standardized English, German etc. whereas in older stages of these languages and in various dialects, violations of this filter can be found. Examples are known from Bavarian, Bayer (1984), West Flemish, Haegeman (1992), Swiss German, Bader & Penner (1988), Penner & Bader (1995), Schönenberger (2006...

Cladistic Methodology and West Germanic

For about a century and a half now one of the usual tasks of historical linguistics has been reconstructing the prehistory of linguistic communities. (That is, of course, the side of reconstruction that non-linguists are interested in.) A perennial question is what sort of model of linguistic diversification best fits the data. This paper will explore that question in the light of data supporti...

Linearization of Verb Clusters in West Germanic

Verb Clusters in Continental West Germanic Dialects

The Continental West Germanic Languages include the standard varieties of Dutch, Frisian, and High German, as well as a large number of non-standard varieties, the more familiar of which are the dialects spoken in Belgium and the South of the Netherlands (Flemish, Brabantish, Limburgian), Northern Germany (Low German), the Rhine Valley (Luxemburgish), South-Eastern Germany and Austria (e.g. Bav...

Lexicalised Parsing of German V2

This paper presents a method and implementation of parsing German V2 word order by means of constraints that reside in lexical heads. It first describes the design of the underlying parsing engine: the head-corner chart parsing that incorporates a procedure that dynamically enforces word order constraints. While the parser could potentially generate all the permutations of terminal symbols, con...