Doubly-filled COMPs in Dutch an German. A bottom-up approach
Oliver Schallert, Alexander Dröge, Jeffrey Pheiff
April 2018
 

In many German and Dutch varieties, violations of the doubly-filled COMP filter (DFCF) can be found (inter alia Bayer 1984, Weiß 1998, Barbiers et al. 2005b: 16–17), most notably in the context of embedded wh-questions and relative clauses. We address the question as to how embedded clauses with or without DFCF violations are processed by native speak- ers of different Dutch as well as German dialects/regiolects. Factors manipulated in the 16 experimental conditions were argument vs. adjunct, case marking, animacy, and complexity (pronominal vs. phrasal). Our results have led to the following conclusions: (1) Beside the well-known factor of phrase-structural complexity, also the syntactic function of the wh-item (in particular subject/object vs. adverbial) has a robust influence on the overall acceptability of DFCs. This influence, however, may manifest in different directions in both languages. (2) With regard to German, there are clear areal differences with regard to the acceptability of DFCs in that the Bavarian regiolect (with a stronger dialectal background) also shows a much higher acceptance of this phenomenon than the West Central German regiolect we observed. Note that in the traditional base dialects, DFC-structures can be observed all over the German-speaking area (Weiß 1998, 2017), a fact for which we present additional evidence on the basis of an analysis of the Zwirner-corpus. In theoretical terms, we rely on the basic account by Holler (2001) who assumes an empty complementizer for embedded questions in Standard German that can be spelled out in the dialectal variants. We make some suggestions for a mechanism of this lexicalization process and offer some thoughts on how it can be parameterized.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003979
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: submitted
keywords: doubly-filled comp, dutch, german, acceptability study, diachrony, microvariation, syntax
previous versions: v1 [April 2018]
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