2.10 Word order inside the middle field — Epoché
What you will be able to do Name the four slots in the middle field and put them in order — time, cause, manner, place — and say the German mnemonic that holds them: temporal , kausal , modal , lokal . Say where a pronoun object goes, which is in front of all four of them, and why: Du kannst mich morgen besuchen. Explain why an English speaker gets this order backwards on the first attempt: Er ist heute zu Hause. is he is at home today , with the two ends swapped. Read a time expression that has left the middle field for the front field — Heute gehe ich ins Kino. beside Ich gehe gern ins Kino. — and say what the move does to the rest of the clause. Prerequisites : 2.9 — you need the possessives and demonstratives, because the noun phrases that fill the middle field are built out of them. You should also be able to spot the two halves of a separable verb from lesson 2.8, since the prefix is what closes the middle field in several of the sentences below. A German main clause has three zones. Something comes before the conjugated verb; the conjugated verb is second; and then everything else follows until the clause closes, either with a verbal element such as a separable prefix or simply with the end of the sentence. Grammarians call the first zone the front field, the second position the left bracket, and everything after it the middle field. This lesson is about the inside of the middle field. That zone is where most of a German sentence lives, and its contents are not in free order. There is a default sequence, learners get taught it as a four-syllable mnemonic in German classrooms, and it is worth having because getting it wrong does not produce an error a German would fail to understand — it produces a sentence that sounds foreign in a way the speaker cannot hear. How English does it English has an order too, and it is close to the reverse of the German one. The English default for adverbials is manner, then place, then time. You say that somebody worked hard at the office all morning; you do not say that somebody worked all morning at the office hard. The time expression comes last, and if you want to move it, the only place it can go is the very front of the sentence. German puts time first and place last. So in the two languages the two ends of the sequence are swapped, and the sentence an English speaker builds by translating word for word comes out with its adverbials in mirror order. The clearest cases are the shortest ones. English at home today is place followed by time; the German for it is time followed by place. English in Paris now is place followed by time; the German is again time followed by place. Two of the corpus sentences below are exactly those two phrases, and their English translations show the reversal happening in three words. This is not an isolated quirk. It is the same asymmetry you have already met twice in this volume. German puts the finite verb early and the rest of the verb late, so the clause is held open by a bracket; English packs its verb together and then adds material on the right. A language that closes its clause with verbal material wants the heaviest, most specific information just before that closing point, and place is the most specific kind of setting. A language that has nothing waiting at the end can afford to put time there. Both orders are consistent with the shape of the language they belong to. There is one more English habit to unlearn, and it is the reason this lesson is placed where it is rather than later. English is happy to put an adverb between the subject and the verb: he often goes , she never listens , I always take the bus . German cannot do this at all, because position two belongs to the conjugated verb and nothing may stand between the subject in position one and the verb in position two. Every one of those three English sentences becomes, in German, subject, verb, adverb. Several of the sentences quoted below are that pattern, and reading them will fix it faster than the rule will. The four slots and their order The mnemonic used in German classrooms takes the first syllable of the German name of each slot, which gives four syllables in the right sequence. Written out in English the four slots are these. Slot Answers the question English examples of the kind of phrase time when? how often? how long? today, often, never, tomorrow evening cause why? because of what? because of that, out of fear, for that reason manner how? with what? gladly, slowly, by bus, with a friend place where? where to? where from? at home, to the cinema, in the kitchen Three things about this table are worth more than the table itself. First, it is a default and not a law: a speaker who wants to stress one element can move it, and a long heavy phrase tends to drift rightwards regardless of its slot. Second, most clauses fill two of the four slots at most, so in practice you are choosing between two things rather than sorting four. Third, the cause slot is the thinnest, and you can go a long way in German without needing it — it is in the mnemonic because the mnemonic is complete, not because it is common. The one part of the sequence that is a law rather than a default concerns pronouns. An unstressed pronoun object goes at the very front of the middle field, in front of every one of the four slots. It does this because it carries almost no information: it refers to something already known, it has no stress, and German pushes light known material left and heavy new material right. So the order is pronoun first, then time, then cause, then manner, then place. Position in the middle field What goes there first unstressed pronoun objects, however many there are then the four slots in the order time, cause, manner, place last whatever closes the clause: a separable prefix, an infinitive, a participle Two of the quoted sentences show the pronoun rule at work with a time expression, and in both the English order differs from the German: the English puts