azhong wrote: ↑Thu Oct 27, 2022 8:09 am
This sentence is from a native speaker, who wanted to tell me that "die jüngste [Mädchen]" is more idiomatic than "das jüngste" for them. I'd like to discuss its word order.
Für mich hört sich für den Einschub "die Jüngste" idiomatischer an, ich kann dir aber nicht erklären, warum.
(To me, "die Jüngste" sounds more idiomatic for the inset, but I can't explain why.
I can understand why the sentence starts with "für mich" now. But I don't understand why the subject "die Jüngste" was placed so backwards in an idiomatic expression. At my current level I might say the first clause this way:
Für mich hört "die Jüngste" sich idiomatischer an.
And after making the sentence I've found more: They used "für den Einschub". It's not the sentence pattern I found in
the Leo dictionary page.
Okay, I think a couple of things are going on here.
One is
topicalisation. This is a general syntactic principle according to which languages treat topical (or "known" information, in some contexts called the "theme") differently from new information (also called "comment" or--in contrast to "theme"--"rheme"). There are different means to accomplish this, but one common solution is to move the known information closer to the start of the sentence. So while German has a default ordering for sentence constituents, there are lots of ways to vary this in order to indicate that some information is more topical. They generally involve what is called "leftward shifting" or "fronting".
Another is
scope, a concept in semantics. Basically, this is the range of constituents to which something applies. It's been most widely studied in relation to negation, since all languages have means (both syntactic and otherwise) of limiting negation to certain constituents. Where scope comes into play is that "für den Einschub" is a qualifying phrase which limits the scope of the generalisation. I interpret the speaker as saying that just because "die Jüngste" sounds more idiomatic in this context, it might not be the case in other contexts. Similarly, fronting
für mich emphasises the fact that this is this speaker's personal judgment and other speakers might not agree.
Back to topicalisation. When it comes to informational value, whether a German verb is reflexive or not is generally one of the least interesting facts to present to a listener. This is especially true with verbs like
anhören where the function of the reflexive pronoun is basically to indicate that the verb is intransitive rather than transitive. This is why
sich gets dumped right at the inner field, even before the subject[**]. It would be different if the subject were pronominal, since anaphoric pronouns are inherently topicalised. (Their whole job is to indicate that what they refer to has already been introduced in the discussion.) For me, both "für mich hört sich das idiomatischer an" and "für mich hört das sich idiomatischer an" are about equally natural. But this doesn't work the same with definite noun phrase; *"für mich hört "die Jüngste" sich idiomatischer an"--with "sich" following the grammatical subject--sounds unacceptable.
So putting this all together, the pronoun
sich comes first because it has so little informational value that this trumps the V2 rule which otherwise requires that the subject be right next to the finite verb. Then "für den Einschub" comes next to emphasise that the statement might only be true in this particular context, and only after that do you get the subject of the sentence.
Is all this making sense?
[*] The part of the predicate between the finite verb and other verbal components, such as a participle or the particle extension of a phrasal verb. In the following sentence, I've
bolded the finite verb and its extension and
underlined the inner field:
Für mich
hört sich für den Einschub "die Jüngste" idiomatischer an,.
[**] In North Germanic languages, the reflexive pronoun is incorporated entirely into the verb, e.g. Swedish:
Det syns ingen snö. "There is no snow showing".
