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- Title
Syntactic variation in German wh-questions: Empirical investigations of weak crossover violations and long wh-movement.
- Authors
Fanselow, Gisbert; Kliegl, Reinhold; Schlesewsky, Matthias
- Abstract
This paper reports three experiments concerning variation in the grammar of German wh-questions.We found much variation but no clear dialects in the acceptability ratings of sentences violating the weak crossover condition. We attribute this variation to extra-grammatical factors. With a sentence completion task, we were able to show that there is regional variation concerning the scope of wh-movement. In a training experiment, we were also able to make speakers of the restrictive dialect behave like speakers of the liberal dialect with respect to wh-movement. We argue that this suggests an extragrammatical explanation of the dialectal difference.
- Subjects
VARIATION in language; COMPARATIVE semantics; GERMAN language; COMPARATIVE grammar; SENTENCE completion tests; PROJECTIVE techniques; LANGUAGE &; languages; LINGUISTICS; DIALECTS
- Publication
Linguistic Variation Yearbook, 2005, Vol 5, Issue 1, p37
- ISSN
1568-1483
- Publication type
Article