Intervention effects in German : a contiguity approach

Abstract

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.