Abstract

This paper is concemed with the so called unmarked (in the sense of Höhle 1982) or basic word order in German. I want to argue that neither is it the case that the unrnarked linear order of the arguments in a German sentence depends on the individual verb ( contra Haider 1992, Haider 1993) nor is the unmarked word order derived by S-structure movement from a fixed base generated order (contra Müller 1999a). Instead I would like to propose that the unmarked word order is the result of a process of optimisation at D-structure. The approach is formulated within the framework of Optimality Theory (cf. Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993) and is based on the analysis ofthe dative as a Jexical case that has been proposed by Vogel & Steinbach (1998).