The Pre-Front Field in Spoken German and its Relevance as a Grammaticalization Position
In German and many other Germanic languages, there is no fixed order of S and O as in an SVO language such as English. Rather, the topology of the declarative non-dependent sentence is canonically defined by the position of the finite and (where relevant) the non-finite parts of the verb. Together, they build up the sentence'brace', i.e., they define the front-field (before the finite verb), middle field (between finite and non-finite parts of the verb), and end-field (which often remains empty, but accommodates, for instance, post-positioned subordinate phrases). The front-field, also called topic position, may be filled by any constituent of the sentence, obligatory or non-obligatory. However, exactly one constituent (which, of course, may be of considerable complexity) can occupy this position.2 This restriction also applies to sentence adverbials and adverbial clauses, and to relative or complement clauses. Cf. the examples in Fig. 1. English, of course, allows more than one constituent before the finite verb, for instance a subject preceded by a disjunct or conjunct (Quirk & Greenbaum 1973:242ff; also cf. Allerton & Cruttenden 7974), or an adverbial clause. Cf. the translations of the German examples (a) and (c):