Universals and grammaticality: Wh-constraints in German and English

In this paper we investigate the movement constraints superiority and discourse linking. These have played an important role in the tradition of generative syntax and might therefore be expected to be universal, but they are usually argued to be absent from German. We looked for evidence of them in German data using the methodology of magnitude estimation of well-formedness, and compared this data with parallel results from English. The results showed these effects to be robustly active in the grammar of German, and revealed few differences between the two languages. We suggest that the reason why linguists have denied their existence in German is that they have been assuming a binary and categorical concept of grammaticality, forgetting that this is merely a simplifying abstraction from the primary linguistic data. We demonstrate that the admittedly convenient assumption of categorical grammaticality is obscuring our view of the syntax, and that studies using our own more empirically adequate assumptions of grammaticality can be productive. In particular we hope that our conceptions of constraint survivability and definition of syntax relevance may permit insights into the size of the grammar, cross-linguistic variation and syntactic universals. An important issue for linguists is the universality of the mechanisms they hypothesize: without the claim of, or at least the aspiration to universality, linguistic analyses lose their importance as significant diagnostics of the structure and functioning of the mind. It is therefore an embarrassment for linguists to find parts of what they consider to be the core grammar absent from certain languages. An example of this can be found in German, a language in which the existence of many constraints on wh-movement is frequently denied, since it is possible to find grammatical counter-examples in which these constraints appear not to hold. This is of theoretical significance, since movement and constraints upon movement are one of the chief components of the distinctiveness of generative approaches to syntax. This is also an important descriptive issue, since many authors have made key decisions about such questions as the structure of the German clause on the basis of data from movement constraints, since these are seen as providing key evidence about the position of the subject in the clause (eg Haider 1993). The concept of the parameter is one response to this: it attempts to account in universal terms for linguistic features which apply to some languages but not to others. We applied the technique of magnitude estimation of grammaticality (Bard et al 1996) to carefully matched and counterbalanced sets of materials. This experimental methodology reveals grammatical regularities much more finely than do conventional grammaticality judgements. In this paper we report a series of experiments which test for superiority and discourse linking (sensu Pesetsky 1987) in German and compare them to equivalent results from English, where the existence of these constraints is not in question. Contrary to the general assumption, these constraints are demonstrated to be fully active and robustly measurable in German, and vary in only minor ways from their reflexes in English. We argue that this supports a model of grammar and grammaticality in which syntactic constraints have a violation cost, but are survivable, that is, a violation does not automatically trigger absolute ungrammaticality, but nevertheless always affects the status of the violating structure. This contrasts with the concept of violability, familiar from Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), where violated constraints simply fail to apply and have no effect upon the output. We finally discuss some implications of these findings for syntactic theory building and the extent of the phenomena space relevant to syntax. Sam Featherston: Universals and Grammaticality: Evidence from wh-constraints in German page 2