German Language Stack Exchange is a bilingual question and answer site for speakers of all levels who want to share and increase their knowledge of the German language. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Sign up to join this community
Am I correct that the position of auch can give different meanings to a sentence? For example:
Ich bin auch groß.
means:
I have some qualities, one of which is that I am tall.
Ich auch bin groß.
means:
I too am tall. (Talking about some other tall person.)
Does that make sense?
Would
Auch ich bin groß.
be correct and if so, which meaning would it have?
Your second sentence is not correct in german. But …
In your first sentence, auch refers to what adjectives could describe you.
Ich bin intelligent und schnell. Ich bin auch groß.
However, this syntax can also be used for the following purpose:
In your third sentence, Auch refers to who is tall.
John ist groß. Auch ich bin groß.
Basically, the position of an adverb can change the meaning of the sentence. This is true for any language. Here's an example for only.
Only he lent me five cents. (= He and nobody else lent me five cents.)
He only lent me five cents. (= He only lent me the money, he didn’t do anything else.)
He lent me only five cents. (= He didn’t lend me more than five cents.)
He lent only me five cents. (i.e. to nobody else)
You can translate these sentence to German and would end up with the same result. Position matters!
However, in your examples it's a little different. First, the second example is grammatically wrong.
And then it becomes difficult. The first sentence can have two different meanings, depending on context. Considering that the tallness is compared to someone else's tallness, sentence one and three mean almost the same thing. There's a very subtle difference, that imho is hard to grasp. In my opinion, the last sentence rather puts emphasis on ich, e.g.,
Du bist nicht der Einzige, der groß ist. Auch ich bin groß.
whereas the first sentence states just the fact that you're tall, too.
That said, there's a second meaning as pointed out by Sam in the other answer. If you listed a few adjectives beforehand, you can add this last adjective only with auch being in the third position.
To map them as closely to English as possible:
1 - I am tall, too.
As other answers have explained, it could mean
"Among other attributes, I also possess tallness" (probably emphasized "Ich bin auch groß")
or
"Like the aforementioned person/thing, I also possess tallness" (proably emphasized "Ich bin auch groß"
So the English and German versions include the same ambiguity. But both are also grammatically simpler than making it more explicit (see item 3)
2 - Too I am tall.
This one is broken. I just picked an ordering that wasn't grammatically correct in English, to demonstrate how weird it also sounds in German. (and "I am too tall" means something entirely different)
3 - I, too, am tall.
Explicitly saying that not only is that other person/thing tall, but so am I.
It's worth noting that this is grammatically a lot more complex than item 1, and so while this is much less ambiguous, you'd rarely hear a little kid saying it (in English or German) when trying to measure up to a slightly-older sibling, for example.
Example 2 is wrong.
Example 1 can both reference the person or the adjective; it depends how you emphasize the sentence:
Ich bin auch groß.
Ich bin auch groß.
Example 3 only references the person.
You are partially correct. The meaning of auch can changes with its position, but it also depends on the stress.
First Sentence
Ich bin auch groß.
Here, auch is an adverbial referring to sein. Depending on the stress in the sentence it can mean different things:
groß: "apart from other qualities I have, I'm also tall"ich or auch: "apart from other people being tall, I'm tall as well"Third Sentence
Auch ich bin groß.
Here, auch is an attribute to ich. (Otherwise, verb would be in third position.) So, the meaning is
indepent of the stress.
Second sentence
This sentence is grammatically wrong. It can be read as either the first or second sentence with auch at the wrong place.
