A note on misplaced or wrongly attached zu ‘to’ in German.
Oliver Schallert
April 2018 

This paper deals with the phenomenon of misplaced zu ‘to’ in German (with a side view of other Continental West Germanic varieties). While this phenomenon only occurs in certain configurations in the standard language, it is common in the dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. Even though some attention has been devoted to this unexpected property of zu, previous accounts don’t seem to consider or acknowledge the full range of structural types. Beside misplacings due to processes like “upper field formation” (cf. Bech 1955) or verb raising, the infinitival marker can also be detached to the left and even be doubled in certain contexts. I discuss two parsimonious options of how these as well as the “regular” cases can be analyzed, namely (a) precedence rules and (b) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985). I will show that even though the first approach has its merits (and might be worth pursuing in other theoretical contexts), the second one is more advantageous. The paper concludes with some remarks on the short-term diachrony of this construction. I argue that it constitutes the paradigm case of what Harris and Campbell (1995) call exploratory expressions.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003980 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	infinitival prefix, german, dutch, dialects, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [April 2018] v1 [April 2018]
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