Eintrag

Titel

Replacing Copies: The Syntax of Wh-Copying in German

Personen

Andreas Pankau

Jahr

2014

Typ

Monographie

Verlag

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)

Ort

Reihe

LOT Dissertation Series

Schlagwörter

Frage
Partikel
Syntax

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with a peculiar extraction construction in German, called wh-copying. The peculiarity of this construction is that the fronted constituent seems to be repeated in all intermediate clause initial positions. This peculiarity is interesting from a theoretical point of view, as it raises a number of questions regarding the way extraction is implemented in the grammar. After an inspection of mainly new data from German, the thesis argues first that the term wh-copying is a misnomer. The apparent copies of the fronted constituent are actually independent elements, which however often happen to be homophonous to the fronted constituent. Secondly, it is shown that these independent elements are nevertheless subject to a number of matching constraints requiring partial identity between this element and the fronted constituent. The theoretical challenge posed by these two results is the tension between them. On the one hand, the repeated element is distinct from the fronted constituent; on the other hand, it has to share some properties with it. The thesis then argues that this tension can be easily resolved if the Arc Pair Grammar framework is adopted. In particular, the way extraction is handled, the treatment of pronouns, and the representation of grammatical relations as syntactic primitives paves the way for a simple analysis of wh-copying in German.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/82081