Die PF-Varianten des Expletivs in jiddischen Sätzen und ihren deutschen und polnischen Entsprechungen

Abstract

The main focus of analysis are sentences in Yiddish in which the subject position is occupied by the expletive pronoun ‘es’. On the basis of various configurations of sentences with and without the expletive pronoun ‘es’ we analyze syntactic features of the expletive pronoun in Yiddish. The issue of interest is how these features correlate with those of German and Polish counterparts, since the contact with these languages influenced the development of Yiddish. The comparison with German and Polish sentences should allow for a better insight into the structures and put them in the functional frames of discourse. Another question is this of how the core assumptions of the “Minimalist Program” by Chomsky agree with the data provided by Yiddish, German and Polish.

Keywords

• expletive subject
• Minimalist Program
• contrastive Yiddish-Polish-German grammar