The Subject-Before-Object Preference in German Clauses

This chapter extends the parsing model outlined in Gorrell (1996). In that article the focus was on German verb-second declarative clauses. Here I will discuss the ’subject-before-object’ [SBO] preference which is evident in a number of different types of structurally-ambiguous German clauses. I will argue for an approach which unifies both the processing of verb-second and verb-final clauses, and the processing of declarative and wh-clauses. I will argue that, in the processing of verb-final clauses, the parser makes crucial use of item-independent regularities concerning clause structure, argument structure, and case assignment. Further, I will argue that the subject preference observed in ambiguous wh-constructions follows from the general, grammar-based, principle of minimal structure building which is also responsible for the SBO preference in declarative clauses. The syntactic analysis which underlies this approach treats wh-subjects as occurring in the same base-generated position as non-wh-subjects.

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