Let's Phrase It! Focus, Word Order, and Prosodic Phrasing in German Double Object Constructions *

Abstract

This paper presents a case study in the interaction of word order, prosody and focus. The construction under consideration is the double object construction in German. The analysis proposed is in line with the following more general hypotheses: First, focus and word order do not interact directly. There are no grammatical rules that relate focus to specific phrase structural positions. Rather, focus interacts with prosodic phrasing, which in turn may interact with word order. Second, the kind of word order variation under investigation here is governed by two potentially conflicting types of constraints. Morphosyntactic constraints that express ordering preferences relating to case, definiteness and possibly other categories, and prosodic constraints that define what a prosodic structure should look like. In case these constraint families call incompatible demands, languages may allow only the morphosyntactically perfect structure, or only the prosodically perfect structure, or, as is arguably the case in German, both. Third, violable ranked constraints provide a well-suited framework to account for these kinds of phenomena. Both the morphosyntactic and the prosodic constraints, as well as those governing the relation between prosody and focus, are implemented as markedness

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