Topic-Worthiness in German and English

Abstract

Translations from English into German show that about every second sen-tence does not begin like the original, although discourse conditions aresimilar and analogous beginnings are seldom excluded for linguistic rea-sons. In many cases, the di¤erences concern word order (as well as perspec-tive and structural explicitness), in particular the preposing/topicalizing ofarguments or adjuncts. To explain these findings, the strategy of discourselinking by the order given before new (for simple, binary information struc-tures) is complemented by a strategy of balanced information distribution(for complex information structures with more than two values). Successfulimplementation of either strategy will be shown to be subject to di¤erentconditions in a language with a head final verb phrase and more or lessfree word order as opposed to a language with a head initial verb phraseand ‘‘rigid’’ word order.