Syntaktische Funktions-Ambiguitäten im Deutschen : Ein Überblick

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the last decade's psycholinguistic research on how syntactic functions are assigned during on-line language comprehension in German. In a language like German, the assignment of syntactic functions is not an easy task due to the pervasive morphological syncretism within the nominal System. Inspired by the work of Frazier (1987) on Dutch, research on German started with the question as to how the parser copes with ambiguous filler-gap dependencies in subject-object ambiguities. Work on this question quickly established a rather general subject-object preference in German subject-object ambiguities. Having established such a subject-object preference, several new lines of research emerged. We will review the three major lines that are currently in the focus of interest: (i) Besides subject-object ambiguities involving filler-gap dependencies, there are subject-object as well as object-object ambiguities which are only ambiguous with respect to case assignment. When these latter kinds of ambiguities where included in experimental studies, it soon became clear that case features play a role which cannot be reduced to phrase-structural configurations. (ii) Garden-path effects that are found when a locally ambiguous sentence is disambiguated in favor of a non-preferred reading have been shown to differ widely in strength. Investigating why this is so is now a major topic both in psycholinguistics in general and in experimental work on German in particular. (iii) The finding of subject-object-preferences might at least in certain cases be due to semantic/pragmatic factors instead of syntactic ones. Several experiments have now been conducted which manipulated some semantic/pragmatic property of test Stimuli in order to disentangle syntactic from semantic/pragmatic contributions to observable preferences