Syntactically marked Switch-Reference: Evidence from German

This paper makes two claims: first I will show that languages have the strategy to mark switchreference (SR) syntactically. This finding is interesting because traditionally switch-reference marking has been considered to be a typically morphological phenomenon. I provide evidence from a corpus-based study that in German SR is marked by the order of the matrix clause and the subordinate clause (linearization). Secondly I account for the observation that SR marking in German does not seem to be a fully grammaticalized phenomenon, but that nevertheless it is reflected in clear statistical tendencies. I provide a modeling of the statistically preferred option to mark SR in the framework of Stochastic Optimality Theory.