| This study examines the function of discontinuous pronominal adverbs in immediate language discourse in German from the perspective of information structure. First, I describe the use of discontinuous pronominal adverbs in contemporary German, e.g. Da weiss ich nichts ( da)von lit. 'That I know nothing about that', as well as their historical development. Second, I discuss the concept of information structure as outlined by Lambrecht (1994) and justify my use of his framework over those of other scholars. Third, I formulate hypotheses regarding the effect information structure may have on the use of discontinuous pronominal adverbs in German. I predict that truly discontinuous pronominal adverbs will appear only in clauses expressing topic-comment propositions where the initial element of the discontinuous pronominal adverb is a functional marker indicating clause topic and the final element is a grammatical marker indicating the object of the preposition. This final element, although syntactically separate from the initial element, is referentially identical with the initial clause topic marker.;In order to test my hypotheses, this study examines the use of discontinuous pronominal adverbs in audio recordings of immediate language discourse. Each instance of discontinuous pronominal adverb use is entered into a database and its apparent form and information structural characteristics, such as topic, focus, and proposition type, are noted. The data for my study come from the Regionalsprache.de (REDE) project at the Deutscher Sprachatlas (DSA) at the Philipps Universitat Marburg, Germany. Interviews on the topic of personal language use conducted with fourteen speakers from seven cities totaling close to thirteen recording hours and yielding 149 tokens of pronominal adverbs, including 42 discontinuous pronominal adverbs, are analyzed.;The results of this study demonstrate that discontinuity need not be purely syntactic. Referential discontinuity, in which the same referent is indicated by syntactically separate elements, is also possible. Furthermore, the study of sentence structure can be aided by distinguishing among discourse types. For example, this study suggests that, while distance language discourse tends to feature integrative structures to support cohesion, immediate language discourse tends to feature aggregative structures, such as discontinuous pronominal adverbs, to promote coherence. |
