The comparison of the use of expletive subjects in impersonal constructions in German and English

Abstract

It is debated whether German similarly to English has an obligatory subject position and consequently expletive subjects. The aim of my thesis is to find an answer to this question. I provide a summary of the history of the Extended Projection Principle and of subject positions in general. I present the inconsistent expletive interpretations of Vikner (1995) Cardinaletti (1990), Cabredo Hofherr (1999), Mohr (2005), and Haider (2019). I display the results of the corpus-based research I conducted on German impersonal passive constructions in the KorAP web-corpus.