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Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith: Der Verbalkomplex im Schlesischen

Verbal complexes – clusters of multiple verb forms that display word-order variation – are a syntactic characteristic of the right periphery in Continental West Germanic languages. While verbal complexes in Standard Dutch and German as well as Dutch and Upper German dialects have been thoroughly studied, the Central German dialect area has, until recently, been largely neglected in this regard. This paper, which complements Dubenion-Smith (2010), an investigation of verbal complexes in West Central German, helps to fill this gap with a corpus study of verbal complexes in Silesian, which is situated in the East Central German dialect region. Based on 100 dialect recordings from the Corpus OS and the Zwirner Corpus, the paper first provides an empirical overview of two-, three-, and four-verb complexes in both subordinate and main clauses. In the second part, the effects of five linguistic variables on word order in two-verb complexes are determined using the statistics program GoldVarb X. The results reveal statistically significant effects of the variables “syntagm”, “verbal prefix type”, “pre-complex word type”, and “status of the pre-complex object NP”, while the effect of the variable “extraposition” is statistically insignificant. Finally, the interaction between the linguistic variables is discussed within a model that draws on insights from other works on verbal complexes, namely Lötscher (1978), Barbiers (2005), and Sapp (2011).