Dependent Contexts in Grammar and in Discourse: German Verb Movement from the Perspective of the Theory of Mood Selection

Abstract 1. Overview Sections 3–4 of Truckenbrodt's paper concern V2 in embedded clauses, and his analysis of such clauses takes as its central intuition the idea that there is a mechanism of discourse interpretation that affects all V2 clauses. With simple root sentences, the mechanism of discourse interpretation links the sentence to the context in which it is uttered; this is one of the main concerns of section 2. With embedded V2 clauses, the mechanism of discourse interpretation links the clause not to the real context, but to a ‘dependent context’ derived from the embedding head (he also uses the term ‘derived context’). In this commentary, I would like to explore this notion of dependent context.