Egbert2002

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Egbert2002
BibType ARTICLE
Key Egbert2002
Author(s) Maria M. Egbert
Title Syntaktische Merkmale von übrigens in seiner Hauptposition: Im Mittelfeld des Verb-Zweit-Satzes
Editor(s)
Tag(s) conversation analysis, German, sentence structure
Publisher
Year 2002
Language German
City
Month
Journal Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik
Volume 30
Number 1
Pages 1–22
URL Link
DOI 10.1515/zfgl.2002.009
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This study analyzes the syntactic positioning of 105 instances of the German word ubrigens (roughly translated into English as by the war or incidentally), as it occurs in a corpus of written language and spontaneous everyday conversation. Whereas theoretically, ubrigens can be placed in different sentence types, and within these sentence types in a large number of syntactic positions, the empirical analysis yields that in everyday conversation, ubrigens holds one main position in one type of sentence: the mid-field position in verb-second sentences. In terms of information structure and theme/rheme organization, ubrigens in mid-field position divides the sentence into two parts. The sentence part prior to ubrigens is low in information and thematic content, whereas the sentence part immediately following ubrigens is topically more dense. In contrast to other positions, ubrigens in its mid-field position is not connected to abrupt topic shifts.

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