Discourse Topic vs. Sentence Topic Exploiting the Right Periphery of German Verb-second Sentences

Exploring the interface between discourse structure and syntax, the present study addresses the relationship between discourse topicality and marked word order in German V2-sentences. It takes as its point of departure two manifestations of a highly marked syntactic structure at the right periphery of the German sentence: the ‘extraposition’ (also called ‘unbracketing’ , Ausklammerung in German grammars) and the ‘right-dislocation’ ( Rechtsversetzung ). In both cases, verbless constituents like PPs and NPs appear beyond the right frontier of the sentence (created by a closure-marking final element), in the ‘extended postfield’ ( Nachfeld ). On the basis of a corpus collected from German contemporary newspapers ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung ), we will show that these two right-peripheral syntactic strategies ‘extraposition’ and ‘right-dislocation’ can have the same discourse function, despite different syntactic and prosodic/typographic features. They indicate that the referent of the right-peripheral constituent (NP or PP) is salient and highly relevant for the whole discourse. It functions as the ‘discourse topic referent’, i.e. the discourse referent that is most stably activated in the mental representation of each discourse segment. We claim that both investigated strategies are relevant ‘forward-looking’ devices (often in a combination with ‘backward-looking’ strategies), guaranteeing referential coherence in discourse by imposing certain constraints on the subsequent and / or previous discourse segment(s).