In Old High German, relative clauses may be either introduced by d-pronouns or by relative particles (or by a combination of both). In this paper, it is argued that, despite their optionality, only relative particles can be considered to be real relative markers, whilst d-pronouns occupy the first position of relative clauses for information-structural reasons. A corpus-based pilot study reveals the properties of relative particles and explains their distribution. The results of this survey are then extended to other stages of the language and a diachronic scenario is sketched in order to account for the origin, development and eventual loss of relative particles, as well as for the emergence of inherent relative pronouns in German.

The interrogative warum connected with a bare infinitival VP forms a specific kind of root structures in German. wh-root-infinitives in general are subject to certain syntactic and interpretative restrictions. The subject argument of the infinitival verb cannot be expressed by a lexical NP; it is identified with the speaker, instead. Due to the lack of finiteness these infinitives are restricted to a non-past, prospective, modal interpretation. warum-infinitives share these properties. But differing from other instances of wh-infinitives they are systematically ambiguous, as they provide a second reading with a non-prospective interpretation referring to a present or past event in which the subject argument is identified with the addressee. It will be argued that the availability of this second reading has to be ascribed to a pragmatic inference which refers to presuppositions of questions in general and of causal questions in particular.

The current paper deals with the Mandarin Chinese construction chadian mei ‘almost NEG’ that is ambiguous depending on whether negation has a normal or pleonastic interpretation. The literature either takes mei as semantically vacuous in the latter interpretation (e.g. Zhu 1959; Liu 2011; Yuan 2013), or attributes the ambiguity to that of the approximation marker Chadian (Kaufmann & Xu 2013). This paper offers novel empirical arguments for the ambiguity of mei, and proposes a multidimensional semantic analysis for the ‘pleonastic’ mei: the apparent semantically vacuous mei is a counterfactual commentary expression with non-at-issue meaning contributions at the levels of conventional implicatures and conventional presuppositions. I argue that this analysis fits with the distributional properties of chadian mei and that additionally, it provides further empirical support for the three-dimensional semantic framework (Liu 2012).

Nanna Fuhrhop: Peter Eisenberg (2017): Deutsche Orthografie. Regelwerk und Kommentar