TY  - JOUR
A1  - Salzmann, Martin
T1  - Variation in resumption requires violable constraints
BT  - a case study in Alemannic relativization
JF  - Linguistics in Potsdam
N2  - Variation in dative resumption among and within Alemannic varieties of German strongly favors an Evaluator component that makes use of optimality-theoretic evaluation rather than filters as in the Minimalist Program (MP). At the same time, the variation is restricted to realizational requirements. This supports a model of syntax like the Derivations and Evaluations framework (Broekhuis 2008) that combines a restrictive MP-style Generator with an Evaluator that includes ranked violable (interface) constraints.
KW  - resumption
KW  - Swiss German
KW  - variation
KW  - evaluator
KW  - Reference Set
KW  - Candidate Set
KW  - dative
KW  - constraints
KW  - oblique case
KW  - relative clauses
Y1  - 2009
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-32251
SN  - 1616-7392
SN  - 1864-1857
IS  - 28
SP  - 99
EP  - 132
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Salzmann, Martin
A1  - Wierzba, Marta
A1  - Georgi, Doreen
T1  - Condition C in German A'-movement
BT  - tackling challenges in experimental research on reconstruction
JF  - Journal of linguistics : JL
N2  - In recent experimental work, arguments for or against Condition C reconstruction in A'-movement have been based on low/high availability of coreference in sentences with and without A'-movement. We argue that this reasoning is problematic: It involves arbitrary thresholds, and the results are potentially confounded by the different surface orders of the compared structures and non-syntactic factors. We present three experiments with designs that do not require defining thresholds of 'low' or 'high' coreference values. Instead, we focus on grammatical contrasts (wh-movement vs. relativization, subject vs. object wh-movement) and aim to identify and reduce confounds. The results show that reconstruction for A'-movement of DPs is not very robust in German, contra previous findings. Our results are compatible with the view that the surface order and non-syntactic factors (e.g. plausibility, referential accessibility of an R-expression) heavily influence coreference possibilities. Thus, the data argue against a theory that includes both reconstruction and a hard Condition C constraint. There is a residual contrast between sentences with subject/object movement, which is compatible with an account without reconstruction (and an additional non-syntactic factor) or an account with reconstruction (and a soft Condition C constraint).
KW  - A'-movement
KW  - binding
KW  - Condition C
KW  - experimental syntax
KW  - German
KW  - reconstruction
KW  - relative clauses
KW  - wh-questions
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000214
SN  - 0022-2267
SN  - 1469-7742
VL  - 59
IS  - 3
SP  - 577
EP  - 622
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - London [u.a.]
ER  -