Condition A Reconstruction in German A '-movement. An empirical investigation
Doreen Georgi, Martin Salzmann, Marta Wierzba
September 2019 

We report on the first experimental study on reconstruction for Principle A in German A'-movement. The major results are the following: (a) Reconstruction in wh-movement is more robust with adjectival predicates than with DP-arguments. (b) Contrary to previous claims in the literature, binding in the final landing site is accepted to a surprisingly high degree. This shows that binding in German cannot be reduced to argument structure but crucially involves c-command. (c) Binding in intermediate positions is also accepted to a remarkable degree, but since similar patterns obtain in the absence of movement, further inquiry is necessary. Our results also provide tentative evidence against a vehicle change-based approach where the reflexive in the lowest copy of the A'-movement chain is replaced by a pronoun.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004580 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of NELS 49
keywords:	reconstruction effects, principle a, binding, german, experimental syntax, successive-cyclic movement, c-command, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [October 2019] v1 [April 2019]
Downloaded:	304 times

 

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