The prosody of German V1- and V2-sentences

Abstract

The following paper is intended to give insights in the prosodic behaviour of constituents in German sentences with the finite verb in first or second position. It discusses the question whether metrical differences are related to underlying syntactic information or rather be surface oriented. It will be shown how prosodic information can be derived from syntactic and information-structural cues by reconstructing moved constituents to variables in the base position and by marking focus exponents, which are relevant for stress assignment. The prosodic structure of an utterance can therefore be created after syntactic structure building has taken place but it must – to some extent – be related to the underlying representation.