A Note on Misplaced or Wrongly Attached zu in German

Abstract

This paper deals with the misplacement of the infinitival marker zu ‘to’ in German. While this phenomenon only occurs in certain config-urations in the standard language, such as auxiliary fronting, it is common in dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. I discuss the misplacement of zu in Standard German due to auxiliary fronting, as well as other types of zu-misplacement found in dialects. I propose two parsimonious options for the analysis of the standard language as well as dialect cases, namely, i) precedence rules and ii) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985). I show that even though the first approach has its merits, the second one is more advantageous.*