Doubling by movement within and from PP in Lustenau Alemannic : On the structure of prepositional phrases and the realization of copies

Abstract

We analyze a morpho-syntactic puzzle from an Austrian variety of Alemannic German, which we term Lustenau Alemannic. We focus on certain pronouns, termed R-pronouns in Germanic linguistics, and their behavior in PPs. Unlike typical nominals in German, R-pronouns precede prepositions. Across German varieties, many speakers can extract R-pronouns from PP. This process is also present in Lustenau Alemannic, except that use of an R-pronoun in PP or extraction of it from PP requires the inclusion of another morpheme, which normally would mean ‘it’. In the context of Distributed Morphology and a Copy Theory of movement, we explain this doubling as phonologically-motivated lower copy pronunciation in a movement chain through a multi-layered PP.