West Germanic language

Presenting new empirical evidence from modern spoken Afrikaans and revisiting some well-known data from Dutch and German, I will argue that West Germanic languages share a designated antifocus position in which anaphoric destressing of definites has to be licensed morphologically.

Scrambling in a narrow sense, because I will only investigate here serialization patterns of adverbs and objects in two-place predicates (like the ones in [1a] and [1b]) within the West Germanic languages, (2) and scrambling in the broad sense, because I will consider pronominal fronting also to be an instance of this scrambling, a move usually not adopted in the literature (see, however, Lenerz 1993).

(12) Similar stress distributions can be observed in other West Germanic languages as well; see Reinhart (1996: 158f.) or Neeleman and Reinhart (1998: 344) for Dutch and for (somewhat different) Afrikaans data, section 3.

In what follows, I will argue that this is exactly what happens in scrambling structures of the West Germanic languages. Consider the following sentences from German, Dutch, and Afrikaans, repeated here for the sake of convenience: (33) a.

We have found such contrasts between scrambled and nonscrambled definites overall in the West Germanic languages. I will repeat here the crucial data, contrasting German and Afrikaans, which represent a prosodic and a morphological implementation of the AF-licensing respectively: German (42) a.

Given that West Germanic languages share a designated ANTIFOCUS position, only those conditions are syntactically governed under which elements can be DESTRESSED and not those under which elements can be FOCUSED.

Crucially, and contrary to Chomsky (1993), we do not assume here any Agr position other than IP to be present for the purposes of case-checking in the West Germanic languages (see Molnarfi 1998).