Author(s): Miriam Eckert
E-mail: miriam@ling.ed.ac.uk
The sentence is generally assumed to be the largest unit available to formal syntactic theories. However, the influence of adjacent sentences on each other makes it seem reasonable to claim that grammaticality is not only a result of the relations holding between the constituents of a sentence but also between the sentences themselves.
In German this is particularly apparent because of the relatively free word order, which is used to express the discourse functions of topic and focus. The scrambling phenomenon poses great problems for Chomsky's Minimalist Program which is based on principles allowing movement of constituents only when essential to grammaticality. If the context is disregarded it becomes impossible to justify apparently optional movement within this theory.
This paper contains a brief summary of a recent Minimalist account of the scrambling phenomenon and explore how it fits in with observed data. In addition, I will outline a further problem related to discourse effects --- the occurrence of null topics in spoken German.
Paper: Postscript (335033 bytes)