PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The present paper deals with a corpus-based study on the grammatical functions occurring in the Vorfeld (i. e. sentence-initial position) of verb-second clauses in German. It examines the frequency of subjects, objects, and adverbials in this sentence position. The purpose of the study is to establish whether the subject is the unmarked unit in the Vorfeld – as it is often assumed – and which other grammatical function competes more strongly with the subject for this position: the object or the adverbial. The data analysis reveals that the subject is indeed the most frequent Vorfeld constituent, closely followed by adverbials. Objects, on the other hand, are clearly underrepresented in the Vorfeld. It is argued that the unequal distribution of grammatical functions in this sentence-initial position is due to information-structural factors.