Cohesive substitution in English and German 229
users, and also about possible processes of change going on currently. Again, this
suggests the addition of a diachronic dimension in the future.
In English-German contrastive grammar, there is an ongoing discussion as
to the high level assumption that English grammatical distinctions are a subclass
of German ones (very strongly suggested in Hawkins 1986, partly challenged in
König and Gast 2009, put into the context of information structural considerations
by Doherty 2004 and 2006, Fabricius-Hansen 1996, and interpreted along mul-
tifunctional dimensions in Steiner and Teich 2004). As all cohesive relations are
realized lexico-grammatically – with the possible exception of ellipsis – this seems
to have implications for cohesion, and substitution in particular. However, the
often derived assumption of a more constrained relationship in German between
grammar – rather, cohesive substitution in our case – and semantics is less obvi-
ous. Our findings about substitution may be interpreted as a stronger grammati-
calization of these devices in English for some areas (verbal, clausal substitution),
and of a very constrained semantics–form mapping for others in German (nomi-
nal substitution). Generalized substitution seems to be more strongly lexicalized
in German, possibly because of its borderline status as a substitutive device associ-
ated with ambiguities and vagueness of scope.
References
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