Clause Structure and Word Order in the History of German

This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into central aspects of clause structure and word order, outlining the different stages of their historical development. Each chapter combines a solid empirical basis with descriptive generalizations, supported by a detailed discussion of theoretical analyses couched in the generative framework. Reference is also made throughout to the more traditional descriptive model of the German clause.

The volume is divided into three parts that correspond to the main parts of the clause. Part I explores the left periphery, looking at verb placement (verb second and competing orders), the prefield, and adverbial connectives, while Part II discusses the middle field, including pronominal syntax, the order of full NPs, and the history of negation. The final part examines the right periphery with chapters covering basic word order (OV/VO), prosodic and information-structural factors, and the verbal complex. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in historical syntax and the Germanic languages, and for both descriptive and theoretical linguists alike.

Agnes Jager is Professor of Historical German Linguistics at the University of Cologne. Her research interests include diachronic syntax and its interfaces with semantics and morphology, dialectal variation, and theories of language change. She is the author of History of German Negation (Benjamins 2008) and of Vergleichskonstruktionen im Deutschen: Diachroner Wandel und synchrone Variation (de Gruyter 2018), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on the topics of negation, indefinites, and comparatives, among others. She is the co-editor, with Chiara Gianollo and Doris Penka, of Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface (de Gruyter 2015).