This paper focuses on two disparate aspects of German syntax from the perspective of parallel grammar development. As part of a cooperative project, we present an innovative approach to auxiliaries and multiple genitive NPs in German. The LFG-based implementation presented here avoids unnessary structural complexity in the representation of auxiliaries by challenging the traditional analysis of...

The loss of regular case endings in modern German has led to highly syncretic noun paradigms that neutralise many of the distinctions retained in more conservative determiner and adjective paradigms. Genitive and dative are, for all intents and purposes, the only cases marked in noun paradigms. Strong nonfeminine nouns have a genitive singular in -s. Strong nouns whose plural ends in a schwa or...

This study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g., the yellow cup) or relative clause (RC; e.g., the cup that is ye...

This article examines the special processing characteristics of head-final relative clauses. As head-final relative clauses superficially resemble other prenominal modifiers such as adjectivals, stative verbs, and adjunctive/complement clauses, their status as a distinct kind has constantly been challenged. We present existing processing evidence to show that head-final relative clauses should ...

This paper is about the development of semi-automatic methods to disambiguate genitive attributes of German deverbal nouns. Human listeners use structural and semantic clues to disambiguate these genitives — tools for automatic semantic text analysis, information extraction and information retrieval need to mimic this process by extracting clues from corpus data. I present morphosyntactic and l...

This paper describes a CoNLL-style chunk representation for the Tübingen Treebank of Written German, which assumes a flat chunk structure so that each word belongs to at most one chunk. For German, such a chunk definition causes problems in cases of complex prenominal modification. We introduce a flat annotation that can handle these structures via a stranded noun chunk.