-trace in German

Featherston, Sam

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2004.04.001

Cited by 30 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…In the past decade, numerous studies grounding theoretical syntax on formal judgment experiments have appeared in journals (e.g., McDaniel and Cowart 1999; Bernstein et al. 1999; Keller and Alexopoulou 2001; Sorace and Keller 2005; Featherston 2005a,b, 2007; Francis and Matthews 2006; Alexopoulou and Keller 2007; Sprouse 2007b), dissertations (e.g., Keller 2000; Hiramatsu 2000; Whitman 2002; Kovalik 2004; Sprouse 2007a), and anthologies (e.g., Kepser and Reis 2005; Featherston and Sternefeld 2007).…”

Section: From Informal Judgments To Formal Judgment Experimentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic Judgment Experiments

Myers

2009

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Informal judgments of sentence acceptability have long been the primary source of evidence about grammaticality in syntax, and have been controversial just as long. In the past decade, there has been growing interest in collecting and analyzing acceptability judgments according to the formal protocols of experimental psycholinguistics, an approach sometimes called experimental syntax. This article reviews the major issues relevant to this approach, namely, the relative reliability, validity, sensitivity, and convenience of formal vs. informal methods.

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Section: From Informal Judgments To Formal Judgment Experimentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic Judgment Experiments

Myers

2009

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…8 However, Featherston (2005) reports that in a magnitude estimation study the Comp-trace effect is "robustly active in the grammar of German", although it is not as clearly delineated as in the empirical study of English by Cowart (1997). 9 Similar results are reported in Kiziak (2010).…”

Section: That-trace Effects In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…See Featherston (2005) and Kiziak (2010) for a more recent overview. 9 We note here that Featherston finds a more general subject/object asymmetry.…”

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confidence: 99%

That-trace effects and resumption – How Improper Movement can be repaired

Bayer¹,

Salzmann²

2013

Repairs

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OutlineThe ungrammaticality that can be observed in subject extraction from that-clauses in English, known as the that-trace effect, has attracted much attention in generative grammar. Until today, most of the writing takes it for granted that the effect is directly connected to the placement or the role of the subject. In this article we will show that this is likely to be wrong. We will show on the basis of data from German that the that-trace effect emerges as the result of TOPIC EXTRACTION via the specifier of the complementizer that (SpecCP). Since subjects are very likely to serve as topics, and the grammar of English does not allow much variation in using other constituents as topics, it is understandable that the that-trace effect was taken to be a subject effect. The gist of our explanation of the that-trace effect is that constituents which have been moved to the topic position, more precisely to the position of an aboutness-topic, do not have a feature for contrastiveness, and that precisely such a feature is needed in long extraction to value a subfeature of the intermediate complementizer. 1 This requirement allows essentially only constituents from the rhematic part of the clause to move long distance.The article is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a short description of that-trace effects in English and comments on some more recent approaches. Section 3 turns to similar effects in German, pointing to means of circumventing the violation which are offered by the grammar of German. In this section it will be established that it is topic movement and not subject movement which gives rise to the observed violation. Making use of a feature of contrastivity, section 4 identifies the violation as related to what in previous research was seen as IMPROPER MOVEMENT. In section 5 the notorious problem of long extraction from zero-complementizer clauses will be addressed. Extending work that has been done on German, it will be argued there that also in English the construction is better analyzed as involving parenthetical insertion. In other words, what has been taken to be long subject extraction across a zero complementizer is in all likelihood short extraction into which a special parenthetical has been inserted. 2 In section 6 we shift from the discussion of English and Standard German to a discussion of Zurich German relative clauses. Relative clauses in this dialect are of particular interest because they show a split between movement and resumption. Subjects and direct objects move and leave a trace whereas indirect objects and PP-objects etc. rely on resumption. Interestingly, this picture changes as soon as we are dealing with long relativization. In the latter case, even subject and direct object submit to resumption. On the basis of the extraction theory developed that far, this change receives a natural explanation, the reason being that the relative operator -unlike the wh-operator in questions -cannot value the contrast-feature in comp. The result is repair by means of resumption. It will...

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“…The discussion in this paper starts from two key assumptions, namely that the traditional collection of syntactic acceptability judgments represents a genuine, if informal, method of psycholinguistic experimentation, and that judgment experiments run in accordance with standard psycholinguistic protocols are inherently more sensitive and convincing, especially to potential research collaborators in the other cognitive sciences (for defenses of one or both of these assumptions, see for example Schütze, 1996;Cowart, 1997;Phillips and Lasnik, 2003;Adli, 2005;Featherston, 2005aFeatherston, , 2007Clifton et al, 2006;Sprouse, 2007).…”

Section: The Design Of Informal Syntax Judgment Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The design and analysis of small-scale syntactic judgment experiments

Myers

2009

Lingua

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-trace in German

Cited by 30 publications

References 27 publications

Syntactic Judgment Experiments

Syntactic Judgment Experiments

That-trace effects and resumption – How Improper Movement can be repaired

The design and analysis of small-scale syntactic judgment experiments

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