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German Sentence Processing pp 25–63Cite as

The Subject-Before-Object Preference in German Clauses

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Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 24))

Summary

This chapter extends the parsing model outlined in Gorrell (1996). In that article the focus was on German verb-second declarative clauses. Here I will discuss the ’subject-before-object’ [SBO] preference which is evident in a number of different types of structurally-ambiguous German clauses. I will argue for an approach which unifies both the processing of verb-second and verb-final clauses, and the processing of declarative and wh-clauses. I will argue that, in the processing of verb-final clauses, the parser makes crucial use of item-independent regularities concerning clause structure, argument structure, and case assignment. Further, I will argue that the subject preference observed in ambiguous wh-constructions follows from the general, grammar-based, principle of minimal structure building which is also responsible for the SBO preference in declarative clauses. The syntactic analysis which underlies this approach treats wh-subjects as occurring in the same base-generated position as non-wh-subjects.

Misunderstanding, in fact, is only a particular type of understanding

M. Bierwisch1

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany

    Paul Gorrell

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  1. Paul Gorrell
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Freiburg University, Freiburg, Germany

    Barbara Hemforth

  2. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Lars Konieczny

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Gorrell, P. (2000). The Subject-Before-Object Preference in German Clauses. In: Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L. (eds) German Sentence Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9618-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9618-3_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

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