Gutzmann, Daniel. 2011. Ob einer wohl recht hat? Zwei Satzmodustheorien für das Deutsche im Vergleich. Deutsche Sprache 39.1. 65–84.
Abstract
This paper compares the two approaches to the interface between syntactic sentence type and semantic sentence mood in German as proposed by Lohnstein (2000, 2007) and Truckenbrodt (2006a, 2006b). Both accounts are based on the idea of connecting the syntactic movement of expressions to the left periphery of the sentence with semantic operations to derive the sentence mood for each sentence type in a compositional fashion. The approaches are evaluated with respect to verb-final sentences introduced by the complementizer ob ‘whether’, since due to its special form and meaning this sentence type proves to be a good test case for any sentence-type/sentence-mood theory. While neither account is able to deal with all features of verb- final ob-clauses, the comparison shows that Truckenbrodt’s approach performs better than the one proposed by Lohnstein.