Predicate doubling and VP-topicalisation in German

Extended doubling and the VP periphery1

A family of ‘doubling’ structures is presented based, on one side, on analyses from the literature on ‘clitic doubling’ of the Spanish type (Jaeggli 1982, Torrego 1995, Uriagereka 1995, Belletti 1999, Sportiche 1998, Kayne 1994, Rouveret 1989), and, on the other, on the classical analysis of the Floated quantifier phenomenology (Sportiche (1988)). A further kind of structure implementing doubli...

German Partial-VP Topicalization Revisited

The topicalization of partial verbal projections in German (henceforth: pvp topicalization) has received much attention because the variable constituency it displays is a challenge to the traditionally central role of constituent structure. In the HPSG framework, Pollard (1996, orig. ms. 1990), and more recently Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1994) and Nerbonne (1994) met this challenge with a variety ...

Argument Selection and Alternations in German VP-Idioms

In this paper I argue that inflection class membership among the so-called ‘primary’ verbs in Lithuanian, which has always been considered to be extremely idiosyncratic, is at least partly predictable from the verb’s semantics. The most important semantic parameters responsible for inflection class assignment are agentivity of the verb’s highest ranking participant (thus most transitive and age...

Martin Forst and Christian Rohrer: Problems of German VP coordination

In this paper, we present the implementation in the German ParGram LFG of verb phrase (VP) coordinations involving conjunction reduction and/or right node raising. We show how the computationally expensive approach proposed by Maxwell & Manning (1996) can be adopted for VP coordinations in a computationally efficient way so that many of these coordinations, which previously did not receive a co...

Split topicalisation and pseudo-partitivity