Incomplete Category Fronting in German without Remnant Movement

Incomplete category fronting in German has been argued to involve movement of a constituent containing a trace (Thiersch 1985; Webelhuth and den Besten 1987; G. Müller 1996). In this paper, we show that the two kinds of examples used as key evidence for such remnant movement, partial-VP and “partial-NP” topicalization, do not motivate an unbounded dependency theory complex enough to license fronted constituents containing a gap. Formulating an HPSG theory based on lexical principles, we show that these phenomena and their interaction are more appropriately handled by generalizing the argument raising approach to partial VPs of Pollard (1996).