Abstract: Upper Sorbian, a West Slavonic language spoken in the East of Germany, shows many characteristics which appear to be caused by long-term contact with German. One of them is the word order, which is reminiscent of the German sentence frame construction (Rahmenkonstruktion). This paper investigates the distribution of the frame construction in Upper Sorbian main clauses. On the basis of original data collected among the young native speakers, it is shown that the usage of the frame construction in main clauses is the default case and widespread. By contrast, non-usage of the construction tends to occur in specific syntactic environments and is often motivated by information structure in narratives: new information more easily violates the frame construction, e.g. in afterthoughts.

Keywords: Upper Sorbian, German, frame construction, language contact, information structure