Functional Uncertainty and Functional Precedence in Continental West Germanic

Abstract

An account of the various word order phenomena in Continental West Germanic is one of the standard challenges that a linguistic theory has to face. In this paper we will concentrate on word order in infinitival complements. In this subarea the order of the different verbal elements has received the most attention. We focus, however, on the order of the non-verbal elements. To simplify matters we will mainly look at the order of the nominal dependents of verbs. We start by reviewing the Lexical-Functional Grammar analysis of so-called crossing dependencies in Dutch as given in Bresnan et al. (1982) and amended in Johnson (1986). In Section 2, we show that another formal statement of the generalizations using functional precedence and functional uncertainty is technically possible and empirically preferable. In section 3, we summarize some facts of Zurich German discussed in Lötscher (1978) and in Haegeman and van Riemsdijk (1986) and show that these facts can only be handled assuming a version of functional precedence.