The German prefield and movement in fragments

The replications and extensions of the experiments by Merchant et al. (2013) ques-tion the assumpques-tion that preposiques-tion omission and complement clause topicaliza-tion provide evidence for movement. In the case of prepositopicaliza-tion omission, the data can be explained without assuming movement by question-answer parallelism, and for complement clause topicalization, there is no evidence for the presumed movement restriction itself. This section presents a last experiment on the syntax of fragments that investigates a well-documented movement restriction concern-ing the prefield position in German. In a nutshell, the idea is that if the preverbal position in German verb-second sentences is analyzed as the landing site for frag-ments, as Merchant (2004a) suggests, only those constituents that can appear in this position are possible fragments.

3.4.1.1 The prefield position in German verb-second clauses

The German declarative matrix clause is generally assumed to be strictly verb-second, so that only one constituent can precede the inflected verb. Tradition-ally, this is modeled with the topological field model (Drach 1937) of the Ger-man sentence, which divides the sentence into three regions, the so-calledfields.

These fields are delimited by two positions hosting verbal elements, the left and rightbrackets. Table 3.22 shows how these fields are filled in declarative matrix clauses: The left bracket hosts the inflected verb and the right bracket the partici-ple or infinitive, if the sentence contains such. The region left to the left bracket is called prefield and contains exactly one constituent, yielding the obligatory verb-second order. By default, all other constituents appear in the middle field, the region between the brackets. In case of extraposition, constituents can be located in the postfield, i.e. in the region following the right bracket. (57) shows that, unlike in SVO languages, all arguments (including the subject) appear in the middle field if the prefield is filled by an adverbial.

(57) Montag

In generative terms, the standard syntactic analysis of German verb-second sen-tences assumes head movement of the verb from T to C followed by movement of the prefield constituent to [Spec, CP], as sketched in Figure 3.12.⁵¹

Table 3.22: German topological fields model (LB = left bracket; RB = right bracket).

Prefield LB Middle field RB Postfield

Peter will einen Kuchen backen der glutenfrei ist

Peter wants a cake bake that gluten.free is

CP

C’

TP

Petert_jeinen Kuchen backen […]t_i will_i

Montag_j

Figure 3.12: Following den Besten (1989), the verb-second word order of the German declarative matrix clause is the result of moving the inflected verb to C and another constituent to [Spec, CP].

51This description is highly simplified. Furthermore, both the order of the movement operations and their motivation and casual connection (does one of them trigger the other, and if so, which?) have been controversially discussed (see Brandner (2004) for an overview of compet-ing analyses of V2). In fact, Gereon Müller (2004) has argued that verb-second order is derived by remnant movement of the wholevP to [Spec, CP] after the other constituents than the verb and the prefield constituents have been moved out for independent reasons. The resulting structure is given in (i), taken from (Müller 2004: 181).

(i) [_CP[_vP5Das Buch₂t₁t₄hat₃] [_C’C [_TPFritz₁[_T’[_VP4t₂gelesen ] [_T’t₅T]]]]]

Müller’s account is not compatible with Merchant’s (2004a) version of movement and deletion.

The E feature on C would always cause the completevP to survive ellipsis, so that there would be no way of generating DP fragments in German. The corpus data by Reich (2017) and my previous experiments disconfirm this prediction. Note that this does not speak against Müller’s analysis, unless movement and deletion is assumed.

3.4.1.2 The prefield position in the movement and deletion account

In order to draw conclusions on the validity of the movement and deletion ac-count from prefield configurations, it is crucial to assume that movement in frag-ments really targets the prefield according to Merchant’s account. The structure in Figure 3.12 differs from the one that Merchant (2004a) assumes for English because C and [Spec, CP] are always filled in regular German declarative matrix sentences. In contrast, English declarative matrix sentences are TPs, and the C head hosting E is phonologically empty. Therefore, it is not immediately clear which position Merchant identifies as the landing site for fragments in German.

In principle there are three options: First, like Merchant suggested for English, there could be an FP above CP and the E feature could be located on C. Second, there could be an FP above CP and the E feature be hosted by F. Finally, there could be no FP in German, but an E feature located on C that triggers move-ment of fragmove-ments to [Spec, CP]. All of these options are compatible with the theory, because Merchant (2004a) suggests to account for crosslinguistic differ-ences with respect to the availability and properties of ellipses by postulating differences in the specifications of the lexicon entries of the E feature.

For the German verb-second clause, as the discussion in Section 2.4.3 showed, any analysis that locates the E feature on C incorrectly predicts that the inflected verb survives ellipsis, because it is moved to C and only the complement of C is PF-deleted.⁵² In contrast, assuming an FP above CP and locating E on F has the advantage of deleting the verb and thus being able to generate DP fragments.

However, it incorrectly predicts fragments to be insensitive to islands, because the defective trace in [Spec, CP] would be deleted along the way. As for the third option, the assumption of an FP in German lacks empirical support, because the prefield hosts only one constituent and fronted foci appear in the regular prefield (58a) instead of preceding other prefield constituents (58b). If no FP is assumed in German, this rules out the first two options listed above.

(58) a. Einen

52Note that this problem also concerns the exceptional movement version of the theory by Weir (2014a). Weir can account better for the non-constituent fragments discussed in this section, because he simply adjoins fragments to CP and there is no upper bound on the number of adjuncts. There might be constraints on the order of constituents in fragments, depending on whether the most deeply embedded focused constituents or the closest ones to the E feature are fronted first. However, Weir places the E feature on C and consequently falsely predicts

Furthermore, the identification of the landing site for fragments as [Spec, CP]

is also implicitly adopted by Merchant (2004a) himself. As I discussed in Section 2.4.3, Merchant (2004a: 702) presents parallelisms between the form of fragments in the prefield and in fragments as evidence for his account. This implies that the presumed landing site for fragments is the regular prefield, that is, [Spec, CP].

3.4.2 Experiment 10: Multiple prefield constituents