STYLISTIC POTENTIAL OF GERMAN SYNTAX

Coherent Constructions in German: Lexicon or Syntax?

This paper addresses the issue of embedded zu-infinitival clauses in German from the perspective of a formal grammatical framework, tree adjoining grammar (TAG) and related tree rewriting systems.1 Two radically different analyses have been proposed for this construction. According to the “syntactic” analysis, embedded infinitivals in German are analyzed essentially as in English, namely as cla...

Lexical Generalizations in the Syntax of German Non-Finite Constructions

Syntax and Semantics of Causal denn in German

This paper presents a new analysis of denn (because) in German. In addition to causal links between propositions, denn can express the causation of epistemically judged propositions or of speech acts. Denn’s behavior is explained by two properties: On the semantics side, I show that denn is a conventional implicature item. Syntactically, denn is a coordinating conjunction of CPs. These facts ex...

The Syntax and Semantics of Focus-sensitive Particles in German

We propose a comprehensive account of both the distribution and the interpretation of German focus particles such as nur, auch and sogar (‘only’, ‘also’, ‘even’). We argue that they always adjoin to non-arguments (in recent terms this means that they can adjoin to VPs, IPs, APs and root CPs, but never to argument DPs or argument CPs), and that they do not undergo LF raising. Presenting a range ...

Emphasizing Syntax for French to German Machine Translation

This paper tackles the issue of automated translation from French to German, using syntactic analysis to enhance the results of lexical statistics approaches of these last years. It is a non symmetrical method aiming at producing correctly built sentences in the target language, from parsed sentences in source language. The idea is that translation between weakly divergent languages could be op...