Information Structure and Local Discourse Interpretation:
Processing the Left Periphery of German V2-Sentences

Thomas Weskott
University of Leipzig

In the literature on information structure, the interpretation of constituents dislocated to the left periphery (the Spec of CP) is mostly analysed as being contrastive, i.e. as inducing a set of alternatives to the focal constituent in that very position (s.
e.g. Buering (1995)). However, this is not the only usage of this construction to be found in German texts. For example in (1), the fronted direct object 'den Kellner' is not necessarily to be interpreted as contrastive with respect to other discourse referents:

(1) Den Kellner beleidigte der Gast ziemlich heftig.
(literally: 'The waiter-acc insulted the guest-nom pretty intensely.'; approximately: 'The waiter was insulted by the guest pretty intensely.')

Rather, the construction can also be used without the typical prosodic pattern associated with so-called 'contrastive topics'. This raises the question how sentences like (1) should be interpreted. The proposal made is that movement of direct objects of transitive verbs to the left periphery is used by speakers to signal the hearer a certain local discourse structure, taking the moved element as a starting point and thereby inducing a particular perspective on the event sequence to be reported.

Formally, this analysis is couched in terms of a left-to-right compositional interpretation procedure along the lines of Asher's (1993) SDRT. It is shown that moving direct objects to the left periphery is connected to two factors: firstly, the familiarity status of the fronted element (inferable vs. mentioned); and secondly, the presence of a clue for the discourse relation ELABORATION.

To test the influence of the factors identified by the formal reconstruction, three self-paced reading experiments presenting short texts were conducted, manipulating

(a) the word order (SO vs. OS),
(b) the presence of a context sentence priming ELABORATION, and
(c) the familiarity of the fronted element.

Reading times and error rates in subjects' answers to comprehension questions showed (over and above the well-established subject-first preference) significant effects of the factors (b) and (c) when comparing SO- vs. OS-structures. The findings suggest that these factors play a crucial role for licensing topicalization of direct objects in German V2 sentences. These results are then discussed in the light of Frazier's (1999) Extended Specifier Hypothesis.

References

Asher, Nicholas (1993): Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Buering, Daniel (1995): The 59th Street Bridge Accent. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tuebingen.

Frazier, Lyn (1999): On Sentence Interpretation. Dordrecht: Kluwer.