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Abstract:
In present-day spoken German, subordinate clauses introduced by the
connector weil ‘because’ occur with two orders of subject, finite verb, and object(s).
In addition to weil clauses with verb-final word order (“VF”; standard in subordinate
clauses) one often hears weil clauses with SVO, the standard order of main clauses
(“verb-second”, V2). The “weil-V2” phenomenon is restricted to sentences where
the weil clause follows the main clause, and is virtually absent from formal (written,
edited) German, occurring only in extemporaneous speech. Extant accounts of
weil-V2 focus on the interpretation of weil-V2 clauses by the hearer, in particular on
the type of discourse relation licensed by weil-V2 vs. weil-VF: causal/propositional
or inferential/epistemic. Focusing instead on the production of weil clauses by
the speaker, we examine a collection of about 1,000 sentences featuring a causal
connector (weil, da or denn) after the main clause, all extracted from a corpus
of spoken German dialogues and annotated with tags denoting major prosodic
and syntactic boundaries, and various types of disfluencies (pauses, hesitations).
Based on the observed frequency patterns and on known linguistic properties of
the connectors, we propose that weil-V2 is caused by miscoordination between
the mechanisms for lexical retrieval and grammatical encoding: Due to its high
frequency, the lexical item weil is often selected prematurely, while the grammatical
encoder is still working on the syntactic shape of the weil clause. Weil-V2 arises
when pragmatic and processing factors drive the encoder to discontinue the current
sentence, and to plan the clause following weil in the form of the main clause of an
independent, new sentence. Thus, the speaker continues with a V2 clause, seemingly
in violation of the VF constraint imposed by the preceding weil. We also explore
implications of the model regarding the interpretation of sentences containing causal
connectors.
