Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Relative clause extraposition and prosody in German

  • Published:
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Whether a relative clause (RC) can be extraposed has been argued to depend both on contextual focus and on whether an RC is restrictive or appositive. However, no previous study has looked at the interaction between these two factors in restricting extraposition, despite the fact that different types of relative clauses are generally taken to differ in how they relate to focus. Furthermore, previous studies have not looked at the role of prosody in accounting for the effect of focus on extraposition, and have found contradictory results with respect to the prosodic differences between appositive and restrictive relative clauses. This paper presents the results of a production experiment on German which crosses the location of focus and the type of RC in order to explore how they interact in affecting prosody and extraposition.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In German orthography, all relative clauses are standardly separated from the head noun by a comma, while in English, only appositive relative clauses are.

  2. ‘Appositive’ relative clauses are those non-restrictive relative clauses that modify nominal constituents.

  3. It is likely that all three types of effects are relevant. Levy and Gibson (2013), for example, argue that predictability is necessary but insufficient to account for reading times in relative clause processing, since the location of certain effects is incompatible with surprisal or predictability accounts.

  4. The relative clause in (4-a) is a restrictive relative clause, as is clear because the relative pronoun that is used, which is incompatible with a non-restrictive interpretation (Ross 1967).

  5. The relative clause in (4-b) can be disambiguated toward the appositive interpretation by the insertion of the discourse modifier by the way.

  6. But see Schlenker (2009) for a discussion of examples with narrow-scope-readings of ARCs suggesting that they can be embedded.

  7. But see Schlenker (2009) for a discussion of examples with narrow-scope-readings of ARCs.

  8. A similar contrast is reported in Huddleston and Pullum (2002:1066):

    1. (i)

      A stranger came into the room who looked like Uncle Oswald. (RRC)

    1. (ii)

      *John came into the room, who looked like Uncle Oswald. (ARC)

  9. As Schlenker (2009) points out, this adjacency requirement could in principle be checked before the ARC is extraposed, at least if extraposition is analyzed as movement.

  10. Even in English, there are some cases in which extraposition of an RC subject position across another constituent has been reported as acceptable in English. Huddleston and Pullum (2002:1066) for example, judge the sentences in (i) and (ii) as equally acceptable.

    1. (i)

      A stranger who looked like Uncle Oswald came into the room.

    1. (ii)

      A stranger came into the room who looked like Uncle Oswald.

  11. According to Asher and Lascarides (2003), typical continuative (e.g., coordinating) discourse relations are Narration and Result.

  12. The reason an NP of the form jeder Wanderer does not allow for modification with an ARC is the quantificational nature of every, which means that there is no referent that the pronoun inside the ARC could pick up as an antecedent. Furthermore, it is impossible for every to bind a variable into the ARC (Ross 1967; Emonds 1979).

  13. Note that in German, unlike in English, extraposition from a definite head is reportedly freely available.

  14. We decided not to include the block order as a predictor in the models reported below to keep the models simpler, since the ordering did not seem to have any important effect on the qualitative results.

  15. Boxplots mark the median of the data by a line, and provide a box around the second and third quartile of the data. The ‘whiskers’ show 1.5 of the inter-quartile range. Boxplots give more information about the distribution of the data, and therefore have advantages over parametric visualizations such as plotting the means of a distribution. We considered using log duration and semitones, but since it didn’t make a differences in the results we decided to use the raw measures as they are easier to interpret.

  16. Note that we added the length in terms of number phonemes to the model that evaluates the effect of duration. This way, we could control whether any differences in overall duration might be due to differences in the segmental setup. While our experiment was a fully crossed factorial design that should control for this already, it is possible that the distribution of missing cells just so happens to introduce confounding differences in constituent length. This can be controlled for by adding this predictor to the model.

  17. The p-value estimates in the running text for the logistic regressions are taken directly from the lme4 output.

  18. There were two significant interactions involving RC-type. One is that the effect of subject focus (as opposed to object and wide focus) differs depending on RC-type, but we only find an effect on pitch (p<0.1). The second interaction regards the durational effect of wide vs. object focus, which depends on RC-type (p<0.1). Since we did not expect either of these interactions, we just note that they came out significant, but we do not have an explanation to offer. The figures make it clear that these are very small effects.

  19. In addition to the interaction between RC-type and WordOrder, we also found a significant interaction between WordOrder and the comparison between Subject-Focus and the other two foci, which we are not sure how to interpret.

  20. A further potential issue with Schubö and Féry (2015) is that only 5 speakers were analyzed, so the failure to detect a difference could just have been a power issue.

  21. We also fitted a linear mixed models to compare, and as expected the main difference was that the significance levels (as estimated by lmerTest) were higher—cumulative link models are more conservative. Bard et al. (1996) argue that ratings should be analyzed using magnitude estimation. This method is conceptually motivated for psychoacoustic measures (such as loudness), where intuitions correlate with ratios rather than differences of the physically measurable correlate (sound pressure in the case of loudness). The assumption is that at least certain psychoacoustic measures correlate with the logarithm of the physical measure (the Weber-Fechner law). The idea that acceptability or naturalness scales are similar in this regard is impossible to test directly, since there is no physical correlate of it that could be measured to test the relation between intuition and objective measure. Furthermore, magnitude estimation as a method has been shown to be flawed since participants do not treat the magnitude estimation scales as would be expected if they were indeed judging ratios, even for those psychoacoustic measures for which the Weber-Fechner law holds (Ellermeier and Faulhammer 2000) (see Sprouse 2011, for the case of acceptability ratings). We inspected our ratings to see whether a log-transformation would be justified, and help establish normality, but this was not the case. We therefore took the more conservative approach to use ordinal regression, which does not assume normality, and does not assume that the Weber-Fechner law applies to naturalness ratings.

  22. Including random slopes for all predictors was impossible for convergence reasons. The full model: ordinalModel = clmm(factor(response) WordOrder*Focus*Type + WordOrder *VPAccent *Type + WordOrder *HeadAccent *Type-(WordOrder:HeadAccent:Type) + WordOrder *RCAccent *Type-(WordOrder:RCAccent:Type) + WordOrder *PreRCPause *Type-(WordOrder:PreRCPause:Type) + WordOrder *scale(VPphoneLength) + WordOrder*scale(RCphoneLength) + scale(VPduration) + scale(RCduration) + (WordOrder + Focus + Type + scale(RCphoneLength)|participant) + (WordOrder + Focus + Type + scale(RCphoneLength)|item), data = data_horizontal).

  23. In fact, Konieczny (2000) found that extraposed word order is less preferred in terms of acceptability even with such small distances, although extraposition is highly likely in these cases. Uszkoreit and Brants (1998) also found that acceptability ratings on extraposition word order were lower than would be expected based on the usage frequencies observed in corpora, speculating that this might show a perception/production asymmetry. Since our rating followed a production of the sentence, this interpretation seems implausible here.

  24. As is apparent in Fig. 8, there was a tendency that non-extraposed ARCs are less preferred under subject focus. This is a configuration where the ARC is placed between the focus (which is prosodically boosted) and the given information (which is prosodically reduced). If both these effects are a consequence of being in the scope of the focus operator (Rooth 1992), and the ARC should not be in the scope of the focus operator, then this effect would be expected—however, it did not reach significance.

  25. The interaction between RC-type and prominence did not reach significance, despite the visible trend that there was a bigger effect RRCs.

  26. According to Baltin (to appear), those can improve extraposition even over long distances in English, although at least according to our elicitations it is not clear that in examples similar to our extraposition would be possible with those in English. For a detailed discussion of the restrictions on extraposition with definite determiners in English see Baltin (to appear), Walker (2013).

References

  • Altmann, Hans. 1981. Formen der ‘Herausstellung’ im Deutschen: Rechtsversetzung, Linksversetzung, freies Thema und verwandte Konstruktionen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • AnderBois, Scott, Adrian Brasoveanu, and Robert Henderson. 2013. At-issue proposals and appositive impositions in discourse. Journal of Semantics. doi:10.1093/jos/fft014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anttila, Arto, Matthew Adams, and Michael Speriosu. 2010. The role of prosody in the English dative alternation. Language and Cognitive Processes 25(7–9): 946–981. doi:10.1080/01690960903525481.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arnold, D. 2007. Non-restrictive relatives are not orphans. Journal of Linguistics 43(02): 271–309. doi:10.1017/S0022226707004586.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arnold, Jennifer E., Thomas Wasow, Anthony Losongco, and Ryan Ginstrom. 2000. Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity on discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76: 28–55. doi:10.1353/lan.2000.0045.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Asher, Nicholas, and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Auran, Cyril, and Rudy Loock. 2011. The prosody of discourse functions: The case of appositive relative clauses in spoken British English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7: 181–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baayen, R. Harald, Doug J. Davidson, and Douglas M. Bates. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59(4): 390–412. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bader, Markus. 2014a. Defining distance in language production. Ms. Goethe Universität Frankfurt.

  • Bader, Markus. 2014b. How prosody constraints first-pass parsing during reading. Ms. Goethe Universität Frankfurt.

  • Baltin, Mark R. to appear. Extraposition, the right roof constraint, result clauses, relative clause extraposition, and PP extraposition. In The syntax companion: An electronic encyclopaedia of case studies. The LingComp foundation.

  • Bard, Ellen Gurman, Dan Robertson, and Antonella Sorace. 1996. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. Language 72(1): 32–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barr, Dale J, Roger Levy, Christoph Scheepers, and Harry J. Tily. 2013. Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68(3): 255–278. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker, and Steven Walker. 2014. lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1–7. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4. Accessed 6 September 2015.

  • Behaghel, Otto. 1909. Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen 25: 110–142.

    Google Scholar 

  • Birkner, Karin. 2008. Relativ(satz)konstruktionen im gesprochenen Deutsch: Syntaktische, prosodische, semantische und pragmatische aspekte. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bock, Kathryn J., and Willem Johannes Maria Levelt. 1994. Language production: Grammatical encoding. In Handbook of psycholinguistics, ed. Morton Ann Gernsbacher, 945–984. San Diego: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 1996. PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Report 132. Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.

  • Brandt, Margareta. 1990. Weiterführende Nebensätze. Zu ihrer Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Breen, Mara, Evelina Fedorenko, Michael Wagner, and Edward Gibson. 2010. Acoustic correlates of information structure. Language and Cognitive Processes 25(7): 1044–1098. doi:10.1080/01690965.2010.504378.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Büring, Daniel. 1997. The meaning of topic and focus: The 59th street bridge accent. Routledge studies in German linguistics. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Chierchia, Ginet, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1990. Meaning and grammar. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Christensen, Rune Haubo Bojesen. 2014. Analysis of ordinal data with cumulative link models—estimation with the R-package ordinal. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordinal/vignettes/clm_intro.pdf. Accessed 6 September 2015.

  • Clark, Herbert H. 1973. The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12(4): 335–359. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(73)80014-3.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Culicover, Peter, and Michael Rochemont. 1990. Extraposition and the complement principle. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 23–47.

    Google Scholar 

  • Culicover, Peter W., and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271092.001.0001.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • De Vries, Mark. 2006. The syntax of appositive relativization: On specifying coordination, false free relatives, and promotion. Linguistic Inquiry 37(2): 229–270. doi:10.1162/ling.2006.37.2.229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dehé, Nicole. 2009. Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theory. Journal of Linguistics 45: 569–615. doi:10.1017/S002222670999003X.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dehé, Nicole. 2014. Parentheticals in spoken English: The syntax-prosody relation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Del Gobbo, Francesca. 2003. Appositives at the interface. PhD diss, University of California, Irvine.

  • Downing, Bruce T. 1970. Syntactic structure and phonological phrasing in English. PhD diss, University of Texas at Austin.

  • Ellermeier, Wolfgang, and Günther Faulhammer. 2000. Empirical evaluation of axioms fundamental to Stevens’s ratio-scaling approach: I. loudness production. Perception and Psychophysics 62(8): 1505–1511.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Emonds, Joseph E. 1970. Root and structure-preserving transformations. PhD diss, MIT.

  • Emonds, Joseph E. 1976. A transformational approach to English syntax. New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emonds, Joseph E. 1979. Appositive relatives have no properties. Linguistic Inquiry 10(2): 211–243.

    Google Scholar 

  • Espinal, M. Teresa. 1991. The representation of disjunct constituents. Language 67(4): 726–762. doi:10.2307/415075.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fabb, Nigel. 1990. The difference between English restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses. Journal of Linguistics 26: 57–78. doi:10.1017/s0022226700014420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Faber, David. 1987. The accentuation of intransitive sentences in English. Journal of Linguistics 23(2): 341–358. doi:10.1017/s0022226700011300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Féry, Caroline, and Fabian Schubö. 2013. Hierarchical prosodic structures in the intonation of syntactically recursive sentences. MS.

  • Francis, Elaine. 2010. Grammatical weight and relative clause extraposition in English. Cognitive Linguistics 21(1): 35–74. doi:10.1515/cogl.2010.002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garro, Luisa, and Frank Parker. 1982. Some suprasegmental characteristics of relative clauses in English. Journal of Phonetics 10: 149–161.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68: 1–76. doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00034-1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, Edward. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance based theory of linguistic complexity. In Image, language, brain, eds. Yasushi Miyashita, Alec Marantz, and Wayne O’Neil, 95–126. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, Edward, Timothy Desmet, Daniel Grodner, Duane Watson, and Kara Ko. 2005. Reading relative clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics 16(2): 313–353. doi:10.1515/cogl.2005.16.2.313.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Göbbel, Edward. 2012. Extraposition of relative clauses: Phonological solutions. Linga 136: 77–102. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.010.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gorman, Kyle, Jonathan Howell, and Michael Wagner. 2011. Prosodylab-aligner: A tool for forced alignment of laboratory speech. Acoustics Week in Canada. Canadian Acoustics 39(3): 192–193.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guéron, Jacqueline. 1980. On the syntax and semantics of PP extraposition. Linguistic Inquiry 11(4): 637–678.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haider, Hubert. 2010. The syntax of German. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511845314.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hawkins, John. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heim, Irene, and Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hemforth, Barbara, Lars Konieczny, Harald Seelig, and Michael Walter. 2000. Case matching and relative clause attachment. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 29(1): 81–88.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hirschberg, Julia, and Cinzia Avesani. 1997. The role of prosody in disambiguating potentially ambiguous utterances. European Speech Communication Association (ESCA), Intonation, Athens.

  • Hlavac, Marek. 2013. Stargazer: LaTeX code and ASCII text for well-formatted regression and summary statistics tables. R package version 4.5.3. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=stargazer. Accessed 6 September 2015.

  • Holler, Anke. 2005. Weiterführende Relativsätze. Empirische und theoretische Aspekte. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huck, Geoffrey J., and Younghee Na. 1990. Extraposition and focus. Language 66(1): 51–77. doi:10.1353/lan.1990.0023.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1515/zaa-2005-0209.

    Google Scholar 

  • Inaba, Jiro. 2007. Die Syntax der Satzkomplementierung: Zur Struktur des Nachfeldes im Deutschen. Studia grammatica 66. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. doi:10.1524/9783050087290.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jaeger, T. Florian. 2010. Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density. Cognitive Psychology 61(1): 23–62. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.02.002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kaland, Constantijn, Vincent J. van Heuven, et al. 2010. The structure-prosody interface of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in Dutch and German. In Speech Prosody, 100061–100064.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kathol, Andreas, and Carl Pollard. 1995. Extraposition via complex domain formation. In Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 33, 174–180. doi:10.3115/981658.981682.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kiss, Tibor. 2005. Semantic constraints on relative clause extraposition. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23(2): 281–334. doi:10.1007/s11049-003-1838-7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Koev, Todor. 2013. Apposition and the structure of discourse. PhD diss, Rutgers University.

  • Konieczny, Lars. 2000. Locality and parsing complexity. Psycholinguistic Research 29: 627–645.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Konopka, Marek. 2006. Zur stellung der relativsätze. In Grammatische untersuchungen: Analysen und reflexionen: Gisela Zifonun zum 60. geburtstag, eds. Eva Breindl, Lutz Gunkel, and Bruno Strecke. Studien zur Deutschen Sprache 36, 141–159. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Per Bruun Brockhoff, and Rune Haubo Bojesen Christensen. 2013. lmertest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models (lmer objects of lme4 package). R package version.

  • Lee, Eun-Kyung, and Duane G. Watson. 2011. Effects of pitch accents in attachment ambiguity resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes 26(2): 262–297. doi:10.1080/01690965.2010.491650.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, William Roland. 1956. English intonation: A new approach. Lingua 5: 345–371. doi:10.1016/0024-3841(55)90028-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lenerz, Jürgen. 1977. Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. Studien zur Deutschen Grammatik 5. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levy, Roger, and Edward Gibson. 2013. Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses. Frontiers in Psychology 4.

  • Levy, Roger, Evelina Fedorenko, Mara Breen, and Edward Gibson. 2012. The processing of extraposed structures in English. Cognition 122(1): 12–36. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.012.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, Richard L., and Shravan Vasishth. 2005. An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science 29(3): 375–419. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Loetscher, Andreas. 1972. Some problems concerning Standard German relative clauses. In The Chicago which hunt. Papers from the relative clause festival. A paravolume to papers from the eigth regional meeting.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maynell, Laurie A. 2008. Discourse constraints on extraposition from definite NP subjects in English. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 58: 110–137.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCawley, James D. 1981. The syntax and semantics of English relative clauses. Lingua 53: 99–149. doi:10.1016/0024-3841(81)90014-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCawley, James D. 1982. Parentheticals and discontinuous constituent structure. Linguistic Inquiry 13(1): 91–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • McDonald, Janet L, Kathryn Bock, and Michael H Kelly. 1993. Word and world order: Semantic, phonological, and metrical determinants of serial position. Cognitive Psychology 25(2): 188–230. doi:10.1006/cogp.1993.1005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Motsch, Wolfgang. 1965. Untersuchungen zur apposition im Deutschen. Studia Grammatica V. Berlin.

  • Nespor, Marina, and Irene Vogel. 1986. Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris. doi:10.1515/9783110977790.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nouwen, Rick. 2007. On appositives and dynamic binding. Journal of Language and Computation 5(1): 87–102. doi:10.1007/s11168-006-9019-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1980. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. PhD diss, MIT.

  • Potts, Christopher. 2005a. The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273829.001.0001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Potts, Christopher. 2005b. Lexicalized intonational meaning. In Papers on Prosody, ed. Shigeto Kawahara. Vol. 30 of University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 129–146. Amherst: GLSA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Potts, Christopher. 2007. Conventional implicatures: A distinguished class of meanings. In The Oxford Handbook of Liguistic Interfaces, eds. G. Ramchand and C. Reiss, 475–502. London: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quine, Willard van Orman. 1960. Word and object. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riester, Arndt. 2009. Stress test for relative clauses. In Focus at the syntax-semantics interface, eds. Arndt Riester and Edgar Onea. Vol. 3 of Working papers of the SFB 732. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rochemont, Michael, and Peter Culicover. 1990. English focus constructions and the theory of grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1353/lan.1992.0065.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rochemont, Michael, and Peter Culicover. 1997. Deriving dependent right adjuncts in English. In Rightward movement, eds. Dorothee Beermann, David Le Blanc, and Henk van Riemsdijk, 279–300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Roland, Douglas, Frederic Dick, and Jeffrey L. Elman. 2007. Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: A corpus analysis. Journal of Memory and Language 57(3): 348–379.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rooth, Mats. 1992. Ellipsis redundancy and reduction redundancy. In Stuttgart Ellipsis Workshop, eds. Steve Berman and Arild Hestvik. Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereiches 340: Grundlangen für de Computerlinguistik. Tübingen: Universität Stuttgart.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rooth, Mats. 1996. Focus. In The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, ed. Shalom Lappin, 271–297. London: Blackwell. Chap. 10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. PhD diss, MIT.

  • Safir, Ken. 1986. Relative clauses in a theory of binding and levels. Linguistic Inquiry 17(4): 663–689.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schafer, Amy, Juli Carter, Charles Clifton, and Lyn Frazier. 1996. Focus in relative clause construal. Language and Cognitive Processes 11(1–2): 135–164. doi:10.1080/016909696387240.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schaffranietz, Brigitte. 1997. Zur Unterscheidung und Funktion von restriktiven und appositiven Relativsätzen des Deutschen. Linguistische Berichte.

  • Schlenker, Philippe. 2009. Supplements without bidimensionalism. In Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schubö, Fabian, and Caroline Féry. 2015. Experimental investigations on the prosodic realization of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in German. Lingua 154: 65–86. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.11.006. Ms. Universität Frankfurt.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2005. Comments on intonational phrasing in English. In Prosodies: With special reference to Iberian, eds. Sonia Frota, Marina Cláudia Vigário, and Maria João Freitas. Phonetics and phonology, 11–58. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1984. Phonology and syntax. The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sells, Peter. 1985. Restrictive and non-restrictive modification. Stanford University, CSLI Report 85 (28).

  • Shannon, Thomas. 1992. Toward an adequate characterization of relative clause extraposition in modern German. In On Germanic linguistics. Issues and methods, eds. Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr, and Robert L. Kyes, 253–281. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smits, Roel J. C. 1989. Eurogrammar. The relative and cleft constructions of the Germanic and Romance languages. Dordrecht/Providence: Foris Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sprouse, Jon. 2011. A test of the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation: Commutativity does not hold for acceptability judgments. Language 87(2): 274–288.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sternefeld, Wolfgang. 2008. Syntax. Eine morphologisch motivierte generative Beschreibung des Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Takami, Ken-Ichi. 1999. A functional constraint on extraposition from NP. In Function and structure, eds. Akio Kamio and Ken ichi Takami, 23–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1994. Extraposition from NP and prosodic structure. In North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 25, 503–517.

    Google Scholar 

  • Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1995. Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus, and prominence. PhD diss, MIT, Cambridge.

  • Uszkoreit, Hans, and Thorsten Brants. 1998. Studien zur performanzorientierten linguistik: Aspekte der relativsatzextraposition im deutschen, CLAUS Report No. 99 1–14, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken.

  • Vergnaud, Jean-Roger. 1974. French relative clauses. PhD diss, MIT.

  • Wagner, Michael. 2005. Asymmetries in prosodic domain formation. In Perspectives on Phases 49, eds. Norvin Richards and Martha Mcginnis. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 329–367.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wagner, Michael. 2010. Prosody and recursion in coordinate structures and beyond. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28(1): 183–237. doi:10.1007/s11049-009-9086-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Walker, Heike. 2013. Constraints on relative clause extraposition in English. In Rightward movement in a comparative perspective, eds. Gerd Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker, 145–171. Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/la.200.05wal.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Warren, Tessa, and Edward Gibson. 2002. The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity. Cognition 85(1): 79–112. doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00087-2.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wasow, Thomas. 1997. End-weight from the speaker’s perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 26(3): 347–361.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wasow, Tom. 2003. Postverbal behavior. Stanford: CSLI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, Duane G., and Edward Gibson. 2004. The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production. Language and Cognitive Processes. doi:10.1080/01690960444000070.

    Google Scholar 

  • Webelhuth, Gerd, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker. 2013a. Introduction by the editors. In Rightward movement in a comparative perspective, eds. Gerd Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker. Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/la.200.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Wells, John C. 2006. English intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zec, Draga, and Sharon Inkelas. 1990. Prosodically constrained syntax. In The phonology-syntax connection, eds. Sharon Inkelas and Draga Zec. Stanford: CSLI and CUP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zifonoun, Gisela. 2001. Grammatik des deutschen im europäischen vergleich: Der relativsatz, amades – Arbeitspapiere und Materialien zur deutschen Sprache 3, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim.

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks for helpful comments to Markus Bader, Caroline Féry, and Ede Zimmermann, to three anonymous reviewers, and the editor, Marcel den Dikken. Thanks to Caroline Reinert and Julia Biskupek for help with running the experiment, and Caroline Reinert, Felix Schumann und Anna Roth for annotating the data. This research was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and SSHRC grant 410-2011-1062 on Relative Prosodic Boundary Strength to M.W.; it was also supported by funding to C.P. from DFG Research Group 1783 “Relative Clauses”.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Linguistics, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M., Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60629, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Claudia Poschmann

  2. Department of Linguistics, McGill University, 1087 Dr. Penfield Avenue, Montréal, PQ H3A 1A76, Canada

    Michael Wagner

Authors
  1. Claudia Poschmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Michael Wagner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Wagner.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

(PDF 81 kB)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Poschmann, C., Wagner, M. Relative clause extraposition and prosody in German. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 1021–1066 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9314-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9314-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation