Coherent and Incoherent In nitive Constructions in German

The notion of coherent and incoherent in nitive constructions was introduced by Bech (1955) to distinguish between two classes of control constructions in German which di er systematically in their syntactic behavior. In this paper, we propose an HPSG analysis for these two constructions which can account for a wide range of their syntactic properties. The analysis is built on our previous work on argument composition, which makes it possible for auxiliaries and main verbs to form a constituent. In fact, such a constituent is treated as a subclass of the coherent construction, and the previous analysis is extended to cover coherent construction in general as well as the incoherent construction. Furthermore, our analysis provides a natural account for the third construction. The term third construction was coined by den Besten and Rutten (1989) to describe the right dislocation of some part of controlled vps in Dutch. A similar structure is observed in German, and the control verbs involved in the third construction also appear both coherent and incoherent in nitive constructions. We show that the third construction can be nicely characterized as a case of argument composition and requires little more than the lexical entries for control verbs which are proposed for the coherent and incoherent in nitive constructions. In the following sections, we rst show various examples of coherent and incoherent innitive constructions and give lexical analyses of those constructions. We then illustrate the third construction and its interaction with coherent and incoherent in nitive constructions. We analyze the third construction as a special case of extraposition of verbal complements, and propose a lexical rule to capture the relation between lexical entries for incoherent in nitive constructions and the third construction.