Zu den Termini ‚unmarkierte Abfolge‘, ‚normale Wortstellung‘ und ‚Grundfolge‘ – ein Überblick über zentrale Positionen in der germanistischen Forschung

Abstract

The question about the existence of an unmarked order and criteria for its distinguishing belongs to the most controversial issues in syntactic description. In this paper, we present an overview of previous research devoted to the potential implementation of markedness theory in word order analysis. We claim that the variety of accounts to the unmarked order in German can be divided into five groups with their unique characteristics: the pragmatic, structural and lexical accounts of the unmarked order, the rejection and modification of the concepts of unmarked order and markedness in models based on interaction between conflicting constraints and – finally – accounts providing a synthesis of proposals found in the linguistic literature.

Keywords

• unmarked order
• normal order
• base order
• German word order