Complex Fronting in German V2 Constructions

The lexical items preceding the nite verb in German V2 clauses have traditionally been analyzed as a fronted constituent that forms part of an unbounded dependency construction. We examine this hypothesis and, based on certain properties of unbounded dependencies, we conclude that the initial constituent in V2 clauses can be licensed by two distinct processes: Clause-bound adjunction of adverbial constituents, and unbounded fronting from both the matrix clause and sentential complements. Prompted by observations due to Hans Uszkoreit, John Nerbonne, and Mark Johnson, we then examine complex fronting, or fronting of apparent non-constituents. In order to maintain the \initial constituent" principle, a binary branching analysis of the structure of German clauses is required. We present an analysis in the framework of Head { Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) that is compatible with Uszkoreit's observations of the variable order of the Mittelfeld. Our analysis also accounts for the phenomenon of modal ip, noted by Johnson and Hinrichs & Nakazawa, and V2 is treated in terms of the verbal feature INV (as proposed by Pollard & Sag and Baker). In both cases, however, the details of our analysis diier from the original proposals. Following a proposal due to Uszkoreit, our analysis is based on a re-interpretation of the function of the SUBCATEGORIZATION list, and the addition of a lexical Subcategorization Order Principle in order to account for the surface order of constituents. Although our analysis is quite broad in scope, it is limited to the syntactic features of German V2 clauses. Thus, we do not investigate the discourse functions of fronting or contrastive stress, and we rely on the competence{performance distinction to cope with the problem of spurious syntactic ambiguities.