What Bavarian Negative Concord Reveals about the Syntactic Structure of German

Since the dawn of generative linguistics, there has been an ongoing debate about the question whether Gennan has a truly configurational syntactic structure like English, French, and Italian or whether it is more on the side of socalled 'non-configurational' or 'free word order' languages like Hungarian or Latin. More recently, a consensus seems to have been reached in favor of at least a weakly configurational structure, whatever this may be when observation comes down to a theoretical implementation. The . question at present is not so much whether German makes use of a maximal V -projection which does not include the subject-NP, but rather how one can account for the 'scrambling' phenomena which make German markedly different from English or even from such a closely related language as Dutch. In this contribution, I will consider some hitherto undiscussed data which turn out to be relevant both for the configurationality debate and for the German scrambling facts. The present data come from Bavarian, a non-standard variety of German, which is spoken in Bavaria and parts of Austria. Like many other languages of the world, including substandard English, Bavarian shows the negative concord phenomena, i.e. there may be more than one carrier for the negative element in a single sentence while its semantics is that of simplex negation. This phenomenon is well studied in languages in which negative concord (NC) or double negation belongs to the standard language, as in Italian (see Rizzi, 1982). It is less often studied in languages, however, where it is considered substandard. An exception is Labov (1972) which contains a detailed analysis of NC in Black American English. In section 1, a subject/object asymmetry will be discussed which arises in Bavarian sentences with NC. In section 2, an account for NC will be proposed which will then serve as a basis for the evaluation of the scrambling phenomena toe be introduced in section 3. Erschienen in: Grammar in Progress : Glow essays for Henk van Riemsdijk / Joan Mascaró ... (Hrsg.). Dordrecht [u.a.] : Foris Publ., 1990. S. 13-23. (Studies in generative grammar ; 36). ISBN 90-6765-417-5