Freitag, 14.00 Uhr
Given that the function of a category is measured by its contribution to clause-organization, we make it a point to focus on what makes a category a distinguished source of grammatical information. For that purpose we discuss the option that grammatical information might be built on morphological evidence. The clue we venture to investigate is to be found in a slow motion language change in the history of German and is connected to the so-called 'agreement phenomenon'.
The data we present stem from the three main periods of the German language and strongly suggest a change of emphasis among the categories contributing to 'agreement'. The developing pattern accentuates 'number' both in the verbal and the nominal paradigms. If 'number' turns out to be some kind of orientation marker within language, we consider this topic to be of general interest. And to discuss it in the outlined scheme of the workshop would be quite tempting.
We emphatically exploit the somehow unusual position of 'number' within the entire architecture of functional categories and combine it with some logical reasoning which takes into account 'interpretability' and the way in which 'number' is anchored in verbal and nominal contexts respectively. We have thereby prepared the ground for testing our hypothesis on a set of diachronic data, which we intend to do by pursuing the following question: In what way and to what means is 'number' responsible for those syntactic effects we observe in the history of German, i.e. word-order, main clause versus embedded clause asymmetry and topic constructions?
The undertaking considers - if not the formalism that usually comes with it - the main minimalist ideas, but is designed in the first place as a diachronic case study.
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