This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.

1: Agnes Jäger, Gisella Ferraresi, and Helmut Weiß: Introduction PART I: The Left Periphery 2: Svetlana Petrova: Introduction to Part I 3: Katrin Axel-Tober: Origins of verb-second in Old High German 4: Svetlana Petrova: Verb-initial declaratives in Old High German and in later German 5: Augustin Speyer and Helmut Weiß: The prefield after the Old High German period 6: Gisella Ferraresi: Adverbial connectives PART II: The Middle Field 7: Gisella Ferraresi and Agnes Jäger: Introduction to Part II 8: Helmut Weiß: The Wackernagel complex and pronoun raising 9: Augustin Speyer: Serialization of full noun phrases in the history of German 10: Anne Breitbarth and Agnes Jäger: History of negation in High and Low German Part III: The Right Periphery 11: Eric Fuß: Introduction to Part III 12: Eric Fuß: The OV-VO alternation in Early German: Diagnostics for basic word order 13: Svetlana Petrova and Helmut Weiß: OV vs VO in Old High German: The case of thaz-clauses 14: Roland Hinterhölzl and Svetlana Petrova: Prosodic and information-structural factors in word order variation 15: Augustin Speyer: Periphrastic verb forms 16: Agnes Jäger: On the history of the IPP construction in German 17: Augustin Speyer: The ACI construction in the history of German

The first comprehensive generative account of German historical syntax Draws on traditional descriptive approaches as well as current generative theory Includes a wealth of examples from all historical stages of German

Agnes Jäger is Professor of Historical German Linguistics at the University of Cologne. Her research interests include diachronic syntax and its interfaces with semantics and morphology, dialectal variation, and theories of language change. She is the author of History of German Negation (Benjamins, 2008) and of Vergleichskonstruktionen im Deutschen: Diachroner Wandel und synchrone Variation (de Gruyter, 2018), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on the topics of negation, indefinites, and comparatives, among others. She is the co-editor, with Chiara Gianollo and Doris Penka, of Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface (de Gruyter, 2015). Gisella Ferraresi is Professor of German Linguistics and German as a Foreign Language at the University of Bamberg. After receiving her Ph.D in 1997 from the University of Stuttgart, she held positions at the Universities of Hamburg, Hannover, and Frankfurt am Main. She has (co-)edited several volumes on language change and language contact and is the author of three monographs and many articles on language change, grammaticalization, Gothic syntax, language contact, and second language acquisition. Her current research explores topics such as connectives, particles and clause structure, and aspectuality from a diachronic and acquisitional perspective. Helmut Weiß is Full Professor of Historical German Linguistics at the University of Frankfurt. He is one of the leading experts in the syntax of German dialects, and is co-editor, with Jürg Fleischer and Alexandra Lenz, of The Syntactic Atlas of Hessian Dialects and, with Günther Grewendorf, of Bavarian Syntax (Benjamins 2014). He is the author of Syntax des Bairischen (Niemeyer 1998) and of multiple journal articles and book chapters on subjects including complementizer agreement, negative concord, possessive constructions, and pronominal syntax.

The first comprehensive generative account of German historical syntax Draws on traditional descriptive approaches as well as current generative theory Includes a wealth of examples from all historical stages of German