Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to integrate several analyses of German verbal phenomena, namely verb second (V2), modal flip, and partial verb phrase (PVP) fronting. I will build on the literature from head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), including primarily the analyses of Pollard and Sag (1987, 1994), Pollard (1996), Nerbonne (1986, 1994), and Hinrichs and Nakazawa (1989, 1994). The central idea proposed in this paper is that the same range of partial VPs are involved in both fronting and modal flip constructions, and that flat structures suffice otherwise. This should provide an account of a broader range of modal flip data than was covered by Hinrichs and Nakazawa. By blocking the appearance of (P)VPs in the German Mittelfeld, the field of nonfronted verb arguments and adjuncts, I avoid the spurious ambiguity in the matrix clause entailed by Pollard (1996).

I argue below for an account of verbal phenomena in HPSG which has the advantage over previous accounts of

• establishing a common phrase structure for PVPs in modal flip contexts and in fronted contexts;

• simplifying the subcategorization requirements for auxiliaries, eliminating ambiguous lexical entries for auxiliary, which lead to spurious ambiguity;

• offering a uniform treatment of the constraint on subcategorized PVPs, that they must include their governed verbs;

• offering for the first time a hypothesis about the lexical structure for German verbs with nonagentive subjects in HPSG. Key in this analysis is my proposal that grammatical subjects of these verbs are underlyingly complements in the lexicon.