Scope Marking in the Pennsylvania Dutch Progressive Construction

Abstract

Pennsylvania Dutch (PD) uses and marks progressive aspect similar to other variants of German. In this paper, we focus on presenting novel data to show how PD differs from those other variants. Furthermore, we present a formal analysis of the progressive construction which addresses the position and information structural contribution of the progressive morpheme. The analysis relies on Felser's (1999) analysis but is extended and adapted to account for PD's idiosyncrasies.