| Word Order in German: An Information Structure Perspective |
| Paper ID : 1009-ICIL |
| Authors |
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Kaveh Bahrami Sobhani * Department of German Language & Literature, Faculty of Letters & Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Evin, Tehran, Iran |
| Abstract |
| The German language has a subject–verb–object (SVO) word order in the independent clauses and a subject–object–verb (SOV) order in the dependent clauses. Despite these features, the language has a flexible word order, meaning each of the syntactic functions, (i.e. subject, object, and adverb) can occur before or after the conjugated verbs or even before the infinitive form of the verb at the end of the sentence. Much like the Dutch and Frisian languages, in German the auxiliary verbs and modals of independent clauses are distanced from the main verb, which appears at the end of the sentence, thus creating a space between the conjugated verb and the main verb (termed Mittelfeld in German) that can filled with an infinite number of constituents. This article intends to find out which factors influence word order in the sentence-medial position. Findings show that free word order is just possible before and after conjugated verb and word order in the sentence-medial position is constrained by certain rules. It was also revealed that in addition to factors related to the information structure such as hierarchy of grammatical cases, semantic and pragmatic factors affect word order in the German language. |
| Keywords |
| Information structure, syntax, word order, German |
| Status: Accepted (Oral Presentation) |