Languages differ as to how big a case conflict must be in a free relative (FR) construction to cause ungrammaticality. While English requires true categorial matching, German allows the suppression of structural cases if assigned by the matrix verb. There are also different types of non-matching languages. Paradigmatic examples are Gothic and Modern Greek. Earlier generative syntactic accounts mainly propose a distinction only between matching and non-matching languages. This is not fine-grained enough to capture the typological findings. An optimality theoretic treatment permits a richer, but not infinite, typology, and it allows constraint violation (which obviously happens in FR constructions). The proposed account makes use of the optimality theoretic conception of correspondence. The assumed constraints are on input-output correspondence (input-LF as well as input-PF), and also on PF-LF correspondence. Free Relative ConstructionsA considerable amount of attention has been paid to free relative constructions in generative grammar in the last thirty years. Some interesting and puzzling properties make this construction worth examining. Free relatives have the somewhat paradoxical property of being clauses that stand for non-clausal constituents. The following example contains five such relative clauses:(1)Wer sich mit freien Relativsätzen beschäftigt, verwendet, was von ihm dafür gehalten wird, sooft er kann, wann immer sich ihm dafür eine Gelegenheit bietet und wo immer er sich befindet.≈ "Whoever deals with free relative clauses, uses what he considers to be one, as often as he can, whenever he has the opportunity and wherever he is" This paper will not deal with adverbial clauses, such as the last three highlighted clauses in (1). I will concentrate on free relatives (FRs) that realise Note: This is a pre-final draft version of the published version. It is nearly, not fully identical to it! Vogel, Ralf (2001). Case Conflict in German Free Relative Constructions.

Abstract. We present data from an empirical investigation on the dialectal variation in the syntax of German 3-verb clusters, consisting of a temporal auxiliary, a modal verb and a predicative verb. The ordering possibilities vary largely among the dialects. Some of the orders that we found only occur under particular stress assignments. We assume that these orders fulfil an information structural purpose, and that the reordering processes are only changes in the linear order of the elements which is represented exclusively at the surface syntactic level, PF (Phonetic Form). Our Optimality Theoretic account offers a multifactorial perspective on the phenomenon.

This article presents several acceptability rating experiments concerned with crossing wh-movement in German multiple questions. Our results show that there is no general superiority effect in German, thus refuting claims to the contrary by Featherston (2005). However, acceptability is reduced when a whphrase crosses a wh-subject with which it agrees in animacy. We explain this finding in terms of the availability of different sorting keys for the answers to the multiple questions.

We argue for the importance of controlling prosody in soliciting syntactic judgments. Through the analyses of a variety of complex Wh-constructions in Japanese, we first attempt to reveal that a construction which requires a non-default prosody is vulnerable to misjudgments of syntactic wellformedness when it is presented to the subjects in writing. We then report on our pilot experiments on the comparison of grammaticality judgments of written and spoken sentences in both English and Japanese, which supports our claim.

The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining the distribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English function words, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, on the other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German.