Long extraction or parenthetical insertion? Evidence from judgement studies

There has been a long-standing discussion of German constructions such as Wer glaubst du hat Recht? They could either be analysed as a host clause Wer hat Recht? plus parenthetical insert glaubst du or as a long extraction from a verb-second clause. We contribute to this debate by using the magnitude estimation technique to test whether the predicate restrictions advanced in favour of the parenthetical analysis (Reis 1995) are borne out in judgement studies. We will see that the overall tendencies of our experiments favour the parenthetical account.