Doubling by movement within and from PP in Alemannic German
Colin Davis, David Diem
July 2024
 

We analyze a morpho-syntactic puzzle from an Austrian variety of Alemannic German, which we term Lustenau Alemannic. We focus on certain pronouns, termed R-pronouns in the Germanic linguistics literature, and the way they behave in PPs. Unlike typical nominals in German, R-pronouns precede prepositions. Across German varieties, many speakers can extract R-pronouns from PP. This process is also present in Lustenau Alemannic, except that use of an R-pronoun in PP or extraction of it from PP requires the inclusion of another morpheme, which normally would mean “it”. In the context of Distributed Morphology and a Copy Theory of movement, we explain this doubling as phonologically-motivated lower copy pronunciation in a movement chain through a multi-layered PP.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007226
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Submitted draft
keywords: doubling, german, alemannic, prepositions, morphology, syntax
previous versions: v1 [April 2023]
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