Pre- and post-positioning of wenn-clauses in spoken and written German
This paper is concerned with the distinction between pre- and postpositioned (initial and final) wenn-clauses in German, and with the distinction between written and spoken language. A simple cross-tabulation of the two features [spoken/written] and...
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This paper is concerned with the distinction between pre- and postpositioned (initial and final) wenn-clauses in German, and with the distinction between written and spoken language. A simple cross-tabulation of the two features [spoken/written] and [pre-/ postpositioned] (section 3) shows that initial wenn-clauses are preferred in spoken German, but final wenn-clauses are preferred in written German. These findings are in need of an explanation, which will be given in sections 4 and 5. Section 2 sketches the main characteristics of German wenn-clauses as compared to English conditional (if-) clauses. The findings and discussions in this paper are corpus-based. They are partly quantitative, partly qualitative. With respect to both dimensions, the claim is that a full understanding of the syntax of (particularly) spoken language eludes the possibilities of a purely introspective methodology. Of course, no (quantitative or qualitative) corpus-based investigation can do without a strong reliance on the analyst's knowledge ( intuition') about the language being researched; in fact, finding valid generalizations always involves Gedankenexperimente playing with structural changes in and recontextualizations of the examples' ; published
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