Scrambling in German - extraction into the Mittelfeld

Abstract

German is a language with a relatively free constituent order. During the last few years considerable efforts have been made in all syntactic frameworks to explain so-called scrambling phenomena. The following paper deals with some tough cases of German constituent order which cannot be described by assuming flat sentence structures or word order domains. The phenomena discussed are stranded prepositions and PP complements of nouns and adjectives which can appear separated from their heads in the German Mittelfeld. The similarity to fronting of these elements is used to explain these phenomena by a generalized version of the head-filler schema used in the standard HPSG framework.