Abstract:
The dissertation deals with the relation between extraction (certain forms of dislocation of syntactic objects) and projection (the building of syntactic structure) in German, especially with regard to the structure of clausal categories and to movement in clause-initial positions. German is characterized by asymmetries between clauses with verb-final (VE) order and clauses with verb-second (V2) and verb-first (V1) order which also have effects on movement types as, e.g., topicalization. Based on such asymmetries, competing approaches on the categorial structure of (topological) clause types of German have been developed which assume either a uniform or a different structure for VE- and V2/V1-clauses. Following minimalist assumptions on feature-driven movement, it is argued that categorial differences can be abandoned in favour of a uniform categorial structure which explains the asymmetries based on differences in the featural make-up of a (single) clausal category.
Chapter 1 sketches out essential properties of German clause structure and related constructions with extraction. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the general structure of the minimalist approach and discusses competing derivational and representational variants of the approach (Chomsky 1995, Haider 1993, Brody 1995). In Chapter 3, a minimal and feature-based approach to clausal projection and movement into clause-initial positions in German is proposed. The remainder of the thesis discusses the properties of two constructions with complex A’-dependencies, namely the partial (wh-) movement construction in Standard German and a special form of topicalization/parasitic gap constructions in Southern German.