SUBJECT POSITION IN THE MIDDLE FIELD OF TECHNICAL GERMAN

Erich Drach (4:12) begins his Grundgedanken der deutschen Satzlehre with the thesis that foreigners learning German are confronted with a IIconfused jumble of incomprehensible rules " for determining word order in a German sentence. To prove his point he then proceeds to list several such rules along with the numerous exceptions for each rule. Included is the following passage on subject position: 'Inversion ' is often the case; that is, the subject stands immediately behind the predicate, and another sentence element is placed before it. However the subject can also stand still further back: Hundert Jahre hindurch wuchs um Dornr~schens SChl ~ eine dichte Heeke. It is precisely when, and under what circumstances that the subject can stand "still further back", Le. occupy a non-initial position in the middle field, that I wish to explore in this paper. By studying subject position in a small corpus of technical German, I have sough