Open AccessSentence mood constitution and indefinite noun phrases
Author(s) -
Horst Lohnstein
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.23.2001.118
Subject(s) - noun phrase , sentence , linguistics , inverted sentence , german , mood , phrase , verb , atomic sentence , noun , verb phrase , psychology , mathematics , natural language processing , computer science , philosophy , social psychology
Sentence mood in German is a complex category that is determined by various components of the grammatical system. In particular, verbal mood, the position of the finite verb and the wh-characteristics of the so called 'Vorfeld'-phrase are responsible for the constitution of sentence mood in German. This article proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction between the pronominal binding of indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analyzed as choice functions. It is shown that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. The various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites can be derived by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions.