Extraposition of Relative Clauses in German in Written and Spoken Language

Bahrami, Kaveh

doi:10.48311/LRR.16.6.6

Extraposition of Relative Clauses in German in Written and Spoken Language

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Author

Kaveh Bahrami

Associate Professor of German Linguistics, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

10.48311/LRR.16.6.6

Abstract

The present study addresses the topic of relative clause extraposition in German. Relative clause extraposition occurs when a relative clause is displaced from its original position, which in German is immediately following the head noun, to the end of the main clause. This research aims to examine the reasons and conditions for the extraposition of relative clauses in German. It also seeks to demonstrate whether lexical elements, such as prepositional modifiers situated between the head noun and the relative clause, are used similarly in written and spoken language. The hypothesis of this study emphasizes two points: first, if the relative clause contains dense information, in other words, if the number of words used in the relative clause exceeds a certain limit, the relative clause tends to be extraposed from its original position. Second, the tendency for relative clause extraposition is greater in spoken language than in written language. The results of this study show that the dependents of the head noun differ in relative clauses in written and spoken language. It was also observed that relative clause extraposition is common in both forms; however, the number of words in the relative clause does not play a role in its extraposition.
1. Introduction
The subject of this article is the "extraposition" of relative clauses. Extraposition of a relative clause occurs when the relative clause does not follow the head noun directly but instead appears at the end of the main clause. In this study, we aim to investigate the reasons and conditions for the extraposition of relative clauses in German. Addressing this topic is particularly important in the field of teaching German to non-native speakers, as learners must understand the reasons and conditions for extraposition to avoid constructing ungrammatical sentences. Additionally, learners should be taught whether relative clause extraposition occurs in both written and spoken German or is limited to one of these forms.
Research Questions
This article seeks to answer the following questions:
1. Do relative clauses in written and spoken language tend to be extraposed from their original position, or are embedded relative clauses more frequent?
2. Are lexical elements, such as prepositional modifiers placed between the head noun and the relative clause, used similarly in written and spoken language, or are there other variations?

2. Literature Review
Sahil (2015) investigated the topic of relative clause extraposition and prepositional phrases in German. Their study covered the structure of relative clauses in the linguistic period between 1650 and 1800 AD, examining 1,108 relative clauses and 213 prepositional phrases. The corpus included newspapers, scientific texts, and prose. Sahil concluded that the tendency for relative clause extraposition is observable in all three text types. However, the study focused solely on written language, raising the question of whether similar results would apply to spoken language. Bahrami (2023) compared the structure of relative clauses in German and Persian, analyzing the grammatical errors made by Persian-speaking learners of German. Bahrami (2021) also explored the characteristics of relative clauses in Persian and compared them with those in related languages, including German, highlighting the grammatical constraints on relative clause construction. Additionally, Kattel (2000), Kattel and Pollard (1995), Keller (1995), and Müller (1999) examined the conditions for relative clause extraposition in German in their respective studies.

3. Methodology
To test the theoretical framework outlined earlier, we compared two groups of relative clauses in German—written and spoken—using a descriptive-analytical approach. For this purpose, 240 relative clauses (120 written and 120 spoken) were analyzed.
For the written relative clauses, 120 examples were randomly extracted from the news and analytical website Tagesschau.de, which reflects news from Germany and around the world. Given that journalistic language can be considered standard written language, the samples from this site served as the written corpus.
For the spoken relative clauses, 120 examples were extracted from a corpus of spoken German compiled by the German Language Institute in Mannheim, Germany. This corpus, made available online since 2012, includes 15,000 audio recordings of conversations and 500 video files, totaling 5,000 hours of dialogue. The spoken relative clauses were also selected randomly.

4. Results
In this study, we demonstrated the reasons and conditions for relative clause extraposition. We observed that extraposition is possible for both restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in German. Additionally, we found that the definiteness or indefiniteness of the head noun does not affect the extraposition of the relative clause.
To answer the question of how relative clause extraposition differs between written and spoken language, we evaluated 240 relative clauses (120 written and 120 spoken) using a descriptive-analytical method. The results showed that the first hypothesis—that the number of words in the relative clause (i.e., its length) leads to extraposition—was not supported. We also found that relative clauses consisting of only three to four words can be extraposed in both written and spoken language. Overall, the tendency for extraposition was similarly low in both forms, with embedded relative clauses being the dominant structure. Thus, the second hypothesis—that relative clauses in spoken language are more likely to be extraposed than in written language—was also not supported.
Furthermore, we noted that the dependents of the head noun differ between written and spoken relative clauses. In written language, only attributive modifiers and prepositional modifiers appeared between the head noun and the relative clause. In contrast, spoken language also included appositives and adverbs as lexical elements in this position.

Keywords

Relative clause

German grammar

head noun

written language

spoken language

Subjects

Linguistics

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