Die Schwelle überschreiten: die Rolle der verbfreien Nachfeldbesetzungen in Bundestagsreden

The essay outlines the properties of the so-called Nachfeld, the post-final syntactic field often referred to as a typical construction of spoken language, focusing on its peculiar forms in deputy speeches from the Parliament of Germany. After a brief introduction on the German sentence and on the typical features of how language is used in political discourse, the characteristics of the deputy speech as a sub-text type of political speeches are highlighted so as to present the reference corpus on which the essay is based. More precisely, the corpus is composed of 40 deputy speeches delivered between March and October 2020, a half of which address the theme of the coronavirus pandemic. The aim of the analysis is to show the constant presence of the Nachfeld in all speeches and that it should not be considered a mere form defect or a colloquial choice, as it is in fact a real means of persuasion. This fact will also be underlined thanks to the consideration of how the Nachfeld is treated in the written version of the speeches developed by the Parliament shorthand typists. Eventually, a system to categorise the functions and the linguistic appearances of the Nachfeld is proposed in order to demonstrate the existence of a real “syntax of politics.”