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18 - Acceptability Studies in (Non-English) Germanic Languages

from Part III - Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Markus Bader
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

This chapter surveys experimental studies of Germanic languages other than English, including the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, and German. Experimental investigations of the syntax of these languages are mainly of two types. The first type concerns syntactic phenomena that are found both in English and the other Germanic languages. Several phenomena of this type are reviewed in this chapter, including island constraints, the that-trace effect, and superiority. With regard to these phenomena, the major question has been whether syntactic constraints apply in the same way across the Germanic languages, as would be expected given the close relatedness of the Germanic languages. The second type of experimental syntactic research reviewed in this chapter is concerned with syntactic phenomena that are only found in the non-English Germanic languages. These include word-order alternations related to the verb-second property of the non-English Germanic languages and the less rigid word order of the Germanic SOV languages.

Keywords

Germanic languagesisland constraintsthat-trace effectsuperiorityword-order alternations
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 477 - 504
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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