Heuristic Problems Concerning the Identification of Grammatical Relations: The Case of the Westgermania (Dutch-English-German)

Abstract

In this paper three themes are taken up from recent literature on linguistic problems of Dutch and English, and developed in some detail. Its purpose is to show how, in certain questions of detailed linguistic analysis and description, the morphology of case inflection, verbal prefixation, adverbial marking, morphological indication of directionality vs. local non-directionality as well as the closeness of an argument indicated by lexical compounding can essentially contribute to, and enhance, the quality of the identification and interpretation of syntactic structure. This would seem to be of specific weight when looking at related languages such as three Westgermanic ones (English, Dutch, and German). Their typological characteristics are still much disputed (English SVO; Dutch SVO in independent, SOV in dependent sentences; German -V- in independent, --V in dependent sentences — this if we follow a non-transformational surface typology), and it is even doubtful whether the three languages are to be judged on a par with respect to their categorial analyzibility: English is beyond doubt a language characterized by the prominence of grammatical relations (configurational language). Is the same true for German with its widely free word-order and a good degree of topic prominence (non- configurational?)?