Intervention effects in German : a contiguity approach

This paper explores to what extent Richards' Contiguity Theory can insightfully be applied to so-called Intervention Effects in German, a set of phenomena which were originally described as constraining the syntax in an interesting way and have mostly been studied in Alternative Semantics terms by S. Beck et al, and H. Kotek. Branan (2018) has offered a Contiguity-theoretic account of Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian intervention facts. I will try to do so for German here. German, as will be discussed, differs crucially from the languages explored by Branan's (2018) cross-linguistic study. Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian, being syntactically right-headed, prosodically left-active languages, first destroy but then reestablish a Contiguous Probe-Goal relationship in the course of the derivation of intervention effect examples. In German, a prosodically left-active but syntactically mixed-headed language, by contrast, Contiguity relationships in multiple wh-questions are terminally destroyed in intervention configurations. This, I claim, triggers the familiar unacceptability judgments. I will further show that, contrary to the languages that Branan examines, in German the effect of Grouping cannot be observed in the prosody.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Hehl, Verena,S.M.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Norvin Richards and David Pesetsky.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124089

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124089