Full text loading...
GBP
-
Syntactic variation in German wh-questions: Empirical investigations of weak crossover violations and long wh-movement
-
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations
- Source: Linguistic Variation Yearbook, Volume 5, Issue 1, Jan 2005, p. 37 - 63
-
Abstract
This paper reports three experiments concerning variation in the grammar of German wh-questions. We found much variation but no clear dialects in the acceptability ratings of sentences violating the weak crossover condition. We attribute this variation to extra-grammatical factors. With a sentence completion task, we were able to show that there is regional variation concerning the scope of wh-movement. In a training experiment, we were also able to make speakers of the restrictive dialect behave like speakers of the liberal dialect with respect to wh-movement. We argue that this suggests an extragrammatical explanation of the dialectal difference.
© 2005 John Benjamins Publishing Company