Refine
Document Type
- Article (5) (remove)
Language
- English (5) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (5)
Keywords
- (A)over-bar-movement (1)
- A'-movement (1)
- Benue-Congo languages (1)
- Condition C (1)
- Festschrift (1)
- German (1)
- Informationsstruktur (1)
- Linguistik (1)
- Morphologie (1)
- PF-optionality (1)
- Syntax (1)
- Y-model (1)
- binding (1)
- copy (1)
- experimental syntax (1)
- extraction asymmetries (1)
- festschrift (1)
- focus marking (1)
- focus realization (1)
- information structure (1)
- linguistics (1)
- morphology (1)
- pronounciation (1)
- reconstruction (1)
- relative clauses (1)
- syntax (1)
- that-trace effect (1)
- wh-in-situ (1)
- wh-movement (1)
- wh-questions (1)
Institute
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).