Discourse configurationality (cf Kiss 1995) is a concept introduced to describe the pragmatic determination of word order prevalent in languages exhibiting Topic and Focus positions. Theories to date are based on a binary classification, distinguishing only languages with strictly defined discourse positions from those with a word order purely determined by syntactic constraints. A two-way distinction, however, fails to account for languages such as German, which clearly have a pragmatically determined word order but are said to have no Topic or Focus positions (as defined by Kiss).
In this talk, I present the results of the analysis of a spoken German corpus. The findings, summarised in the following points, strongly indicate that German is to be classed as a discourse configurational language, if the binary distinction is to be upheld:
Examples of the latter point often contain null topics in initial position, eg:
(das) MEIN ich.
(that) mean I
"I MEAN that."
Although narrow-broad ambiguity of focus scope in canonical sentences can explain the choice of the non-canonical form in certain contexts, the existence of an unacceptable canonical word order nonetheless poses an interesting challenge for any theory claiming that German is non-discourse configurational.
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