On Postinitial Aber and Other Syntactic Transgressions: Some Considerations on the Nature of V2 in German

Abstract

At least since the seminal works on the clause structure of German (Bierwisch 1963, Thiersch 1978, Den Besten 1983 in the generative framework; Drach 1963 and Höhle 1986 within the Topological Field Model), much attention has been devoted to cases of apparent violation of the strict Verb-Second (V2) word order that characterizes matrix but not embedded clauses in German. In particular, phenomena such as multiply-filled prefield (Müller 2003, 2005, 2013; Speyer 2008; Bildhauer 2011; Müller et al. 2012) and so-called postinitial adverbial connectors (Métrich & Courdier 1995, Pasch et al. 2003, Breindl 2008, Volodina & Weiß 2010) in main clauses have been discussed. In this paper, I propose a novel approach to the nature and formal status of V2 in German, showing that a slightly different postulation of its structural features solves the problem of finding ad-hoc solutions to each “deviant” phenomenon.