The V1-order in declarative clauses is well attested in Old High German. However, during the Middle High German period, V1 declarative clauses decrease or disappear completely from the language. Traditionally, they are assumed to suddenly reappear during Early New High German and then continue up to the present day. Nevertheless, rare cases of V1-clauses are attested in Middle High German manuscripts. In this paper, it will be argued that, even if the V1-pattern drastically decreases during the late Old High German period, it has been available throughout the history of the language. In particular, it will be argued that the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the V1-pattern have not varied during the centuries. Furthermore, the paper deals with possible syntactic explanations for the decrease of this pattern during the Middle High German period.

This paper proposes a syntactic and semantic addition to GToBI, the most widely used annotation system of German intonation. This proposal, called R-GToBI for 'Revised GToBI', goes together with a radical simplification of the tonal inventory used in the annotation. Every pitch accent is monotonal – H* or L* – and is understood as a target. Pitch accents are followed by boundary tones of prosodic domains that are primarily motivated by syntactic structure. Prosodic phrases come in two variants, p-phrases (prosodic phrases) and i-phrases (intonation phrases), which are recursive categories. These domains have monotonal boundary tones. Intonational contours are shown to arise through the combination of pitch accents and boundarytones. The scaling of individual tones is dependent on the register used in their prosodic phrases and on the information structural status of the words and constituents. The default case is a progressive downstep – each p-phrase is downstepped relatively to a preceding one –, but focus may cause upstep of prosodic domains. The proposal is illustrated with the training material of GToBI. The revised version is shown to be more robust and easier to use than the original variant, as it rests not only on the grammar of tones but also on other parts of grammar.

A new research institute is introduced here which studies the representation and processing of language in multilingual individuals, focusing on morphological and syntactic phenomena. Projects within this research institute investigate grammatical processing in different kinds of multilingual populations, in comparison to monolinguals, using current psycholinguistic and neuro-cognitive experimental techniques. Our goal is to achieve a better understanding of the temporal dynamics of multilingual language processing and of how grammatical knowledge and processing mechanisms are related in development. In addition to our research activities, we will also provide advice to practitioners and educators concerned with multilingual individuals.