Der Begriff des Postponierers im Licht von Sprachvergleichsdaten Deutsch-Italienisch

This article studies the syntax and semantics of so-called postponers, i.e. appending conjunctions which require the subordinate clause they introduce to follow the main clause. German sodass and zumal are prototypical examples, which illustrate the grammatical properties of those connectives. Other languages have conjunctions with similar characteristics, e.g. Italian cosicché, tanto più che and perché. In the first part of the article we discuss whether the concept of the postponer brings benefits for comparative grammatical descriptions. In a subsequent step, the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the German postponers is examined more thoroughly. Historical evidence characterises them as manifestations of the transition from adverbial connectives to subor- dinating conjunctions. It becomes apparent that each postponer has its individual grammatical properties, so that it seems questionable whether they should be considered instances of one and the same category.