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Document Details : Title: Syntactic Competence and Performance Based Variation Subtitle: The Case of German Particle Verbs Author(s): ÖHL, Peter , FALK, Simone Journal: Leuvense Bijdragen - Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology Volume: 97 Date: 2011 Pages: 170-202 DOI: 10.2143/LB.97.0.2977251 Abstract : This study investigates the reasons for the heterogeneous syntactic behaviour of separable verbal particles in German, which is often regarded as a paradox: they look like heads if they are in their default positions but occur as phrases in SPEC/CP. The central hypothesis, which has inspired two statistically evaluated empirical experiments with 76 participants, is that particles are in SPEC/CP only if they head a phrase and they do so only under specific (discourse-)semantic conditions. The first experiment investigated the difference in acceptability of particles and clearly phrasal constituents in three topological positions: the prefield, a derived position in the middlefield, and the default position. The second experiment explored whether the modification of the particle by an intensifier improves the acceptability in the derived positions. One result tentatively confirmed the central role of the formal criteria above. Another result was that deviant particle movement is very often judged as grammatically marked but not as ungrammatical. This is explained here as the speakers' tendency to marginally accept movement on the grounds of performance-based factors overriding the formal criteria. The remaining paradox – why the particles sometimes behave like heads, sometimes like phrases – is finally given a tentative solution claiming that the head of a phrase in SPEC/CP can form a dependency with V°. The default position of particles, however, is a head in the V-Cluster. |
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