Case Syncretism, Animacy, and Word Order in Continental West Germanic: Neurolinguistic Evidence from a Comparative Study on Standard German, Zurich German, and Fering (North Frisian)

Dröge, Alexander; Raps, Elisabeth; Fleischer, Jürg; Billion, Sarah K H; Meyer, Martin; Schmid, Stephan; Schlesewsky, Matthias; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina

doi:10.1017/S1470542719000199

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Dröge, A., Raps, E., Fleischer, J., Billion, S. K. H., Meyer, M., Schmid, S., Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. (2020). Case Syncretism, Animacy, and Word Order in Continental West Germanic: Neurolinguistic Evidence from a Comparative Study on Standard German, Zurich German, and Fering (North Frisian). Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 32(3), 217–310. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542719000199

Abstract

To understand a sentence, it is crucial to understand who is doing what. The interplay of morphological case marking, argument serialization, and animacy provides linguistic cues for the processing system to rapidly identify the thematic roles of the arguments. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates on-line brain responses during argument identification in Zurich German, a High Alemannic dialect, and in Fering, a North Frisian variety, which both exhibit reduced case systems as compared to Standard German.