TY - JOUR AU - Müller, Stefan AU - Ørsnes, Bjarne PY - 2011/11/04 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Positional expletives in Danish, German, and Yiddish JF - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar JA - hpsg VL - IS - SE - Conference papers DO - 10.21248/hpsg.2011.10 UR - https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/757 SP - 167–187 AB - <p>This paper deals with expletives that are inserted into clauses for structural reasons. We willfocus on the Germanic languages Danish, German, and Yiddish. In Danish and Yiddish expletives areinserted in preverbal position in certain <em>wh</em>-clauses: In Danish such an insertion isobserved when the subject is locally extracted from an SVO configuration in non-assertiveclauses. In Yiddish <em>wh</em>-clauses are formed from a <em>wh</em>-phrase and a V2 clause. If noelement would be fronted in the embedded V2 clause, an expletive is inserted in non-assertiveclauses in order to meet the V3 requirement for embedded clauses. Inaddition to embedded <em>wh</em>-clauses,declarative V2 clauses also allow the insertion of an expletive. In Danish the expletive fills thesubject position and is not necessarily fronted. In German and Yiddish the expletive has to occur infronted position. In contrast to Danish and Yiddish, German does notinsert expletives into embedded <em>wh</em>-clauses. They areinserted only into declarative V2 clauses in order to fulfill the V2 requirement without having tofront another constituent. In this paper we try to provide an account that captures thecommonalities between the three languages while being able to account for the differences.</p> ER -