2022, Czypionka, Anna, Kharaman, Mariya, Bayer, Josef, Romero, Maribel, Eulitz, Carsten

2020, Broekhuis, Hans, Bayer, Josef

This article compares two alternatives to the standard movement-and-deletion approach to clausal ellipsis, which postulates deletion of TP after the remnants of ellipsis are (sometimes exceptionally) A′-moved into the left periphery of the clause. One alternative is the in-situ approach, which denies the involvement of movement in the derivation of clausal ellipsis; it claims that clausal ellipsis can apply to any run-of-the-mill syntactic structure and simply deletes the familiar/given information from the propositional domain of the clause. Another alternative is the selective spell-out approach; it denies the involvement of deletion and states that the remnants undergo regular A′-movement into the specifiers of specific semantically relevant functional projections (CP, FocusP, NegP, etc.), which are subsequently selected for spell-out. This article argues that the selective spell-out approach is superior to the two deletion approaches.

2019-11-18, Bayer, Josef

2018-09-24, Bayer, Josef

In this chapter, it will be shown that in the grammar of German, discourse as well as focus particles are part of the functional structure of the clause, and that in the unmarked case both types of particles take scope exactly where they are merged. Their scope must not be changed in the ongoing derivation. In other words, they are “frozen in place”. A challenge comes from those cases in which particles form constituents with sub-sentential phrases such as my bike or in which village, i.e. phrases which do not qualify as scope domains. While co-constituency with sub-sentential phrases is a widely known property of focus particles, corresponding constellations with discourse particles are less widely known and therefore more challenging. Due to this, the focus of the chapter will be on discourse particles. In part 1, I will present what I take to be the current base-line of a syntactic-semantic representation of discourse particles (in German and hopefully beyond). Part 2 develops an account of discourse particles in wh-questions and their dependence on interrogative force. Part 3 shows how discourse particles can directly combine with wh-phrases, and how the movement of phrases that are composed in such a way and their scope properties can be integrated into the account developed in part 2. Importantly, I will show that their scope freezes in a position lower than the position seen in surface structure. This finding defines the goal of our consideration of focus particles. Part 4 integrates focus particles and shows that the analysis gets close to a unified account of focus particles and discourse particles. The perspective and advantage of a unified theory of particles is commented on in section 5. Section 6 draws some conclusions.

2021, Czypionka, Anna, Romero, Maribel, Bayer, Josef

Question-sensitive discourse particles (QDiPs) like German denn introduce non-at-issue meaning that intuitively reshapes the Force of the interrogative clause. QDiPs have interesting licensing conditions: While Q-operators do not license QDiPs across clause boundaries, embedded QDiPs can be licensed if the wh-element was moved from the clause containing the QDiP. We present the results of two rating and two self-paced reading studies, with the following main results. First, outright licensing violations cause strong effects. Second, for embedded DiPs, a mild increase is found in processing cost for successful long-distance licensing. Third, effects for violations of syntactic locality are surprisingly weak in offline and online measures. We discuss two potential ways to account for the last findings. On the one hand, we consider an explanation in terms of processing errors. On the other hand, we offer a characterization of pragmatic aspects of QDiP licensing via focus association that may contribute to non-syntactic/non-semantic QDiP licensing.

2020, Bayer, Josef

2019, Bayer, Josef, Viesel, Yvonne

2020, Bayer, Josef, Freitag, Constantin

In this chapter, it is shown that finite verbs which are attracted by Verb-Second (V2) movement are reconstructed into their base position for interpretation. In fact, the lexical part of the finite verb is never interpreted in its fronted position. We present two groups of empirical findings which strongly support this conclusion. The first group provides grammar-internal evidence for reconstruction, the second group shows that the verb’s reconstruction can also be traced in the process of human sentence comprehension. The German verb brauchen, which happens to be a negative polarity item and thus needs to be interpreted in the scope of negation, provides evidence for the reconstruction process in on-line comprehension. Our discussion is embedded in a review of sentence processing in German. It is shown how processing can be efficient despite the fact that the verb’s semantic contribution may be delayed. Our account of V2 in grammar and parsing supports a rather tight link between the competence grammar and the dynamics of sentence processing.

2020, Bayer, Josef

The Bangla discourse particle –to and the German discourse particle doch share a number of syntactic and semantic properties. Their phonetic similarity suggests a remote historical relation. While the latter part will only be mentioned and must remain for the specialists in Indo-European reconstruction, the present short study will highlight points of convergence between the two languages with respect to these particles along a series of concrete tests. The convergence appears to be more than accidental.

2019, Bayer, Josef