Current theories of the syntax-semantics interface associate aspects of meaning that cannot be traced to visible structure with empty projecting heads or constructions as wholes. We present an alternative compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal or comparative meaning of inchoative, middle, excessive and directional complement constructions. Accordingly, the hidden meaning results from a repair mechanism that passes on a locally problematic meaning component to the next higher derivational cycle. The meaning component in question is one half of the logical form of Difference as contributed by certain functional elements or by syntactically transitive (nominative–accusative) configurations.

The focus of this paper is about the copula+infinitive in Modern German, its older stages, and its dialectal and sociolectal varieties. In doing so, the paper comes to conclusions different from other discussion of this topic, mainly Demske 1994. The prepositional infinitive and the verbal substantive (gerund) in modern German are not only minimally distinct syntactic structures, but they also have a clear sociolectal distribution: gerunds are more or less restricted to the spoken dialects with the prepositional infinitive/PI being banned from South German/SG, while the PI is the standard in Modern German/MStG. It is shown that the historically original gerundial form was heavily underspecified with respect to a number of grammatical codes. The prepositional infinitive, which grew out of this gerund due to the later demise of case coding on the infinitive, lost the original multiplicity of meaning to make room for only one meaning component: the modality of necessity. Attention will be drawn to adjacent meanings that the modern dialectal gerund encapsulates: the tough-movement construal, the modal
passive, and both reason and purpose embedded question infinitivals. Languages other than German adduced for comparison are Gothic, Old and Middle English, modern Dutch, and Polish. Next to tough-construals and their structural and semantic conditions, also sluicing construals are considered and discussed in some detail. Yet, the main question this discussion pursues is why it is that the oral-only coded sociolects (and their historical predecessors) take recourse to the old gerundial forms, while the modern written standard of German developed the prepositional infinitive – either formal variant almost entirely to the exclusion of the other.

The traditional description of the phonem-graphem-relations in graphematics is not compatible with a phonological theory, in which an underlying vowel schwa is not assumed. If schwa is not a phoneme, it remains unclear, to which level of phonological representation the grapheme is related in words with a schwa-0-alternation. In the present article it is argued that the phonetic representation is the appropriate input for the orthography. A precise description of GPK-rules in words with a schwa-0-alternation is not possible without the assumption of a threefold distinction of vowels in German. In analyses with only one or two vowel series no graphematic condition is related to short tense vowels. The writing of schwa and the vowels alternating with schwa together with the regularities of double consonant writing are not explainable without reference to this vowel group. Therefore the phonetic representation is the base for orthography.

Josef Bayer, Roland Hinterhölzl & Andreas Trotzke (eds.) (2015):
Discourse-oriented Syntax. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.