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In:Dependency Linguistics: Recent advances in linguistic theory using dependency structures
Edited by Kim Gerdes, Eva Hajičová and Leo Wanner
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 215] 2014
► pp. 299–324

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Wh-copying in German as replacement

 | Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main
Published online: 1 October 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.215.14pan
This paper offers an argument for the superiority of a view on sentence structure based on grammatical relations compared to one based on phrase structure (PS) representation. The argument is based on the phenomenon of wh-copying in German. Wh-copying in German poses a problem for approaches based on PS representations because the construction is governed by two generalizations which a PS approach fails to capture. As soon as a relational perspective on syntactic structures is adopted, however, the generalizations can be captured. I will present an analysis for wh-copying in German within the Arc Pair Grammar framework, which does adopt such a relational view. It will be shown that the operation Replace in interaction with other principles of that framework successfully captures the two generalizations of wh-copying in German, and that it eventually even allows one to reduce the two generalizations to a single one.
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Fanselow, Gisbert, Sjef Barbiers, Jessica M. M. Brown, Natasja Delbar, Sophia Nauta & Johannes Rothert
2024. On the asymmetry of wh-doubling in varieties of German and Dutch. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 43:1 ► pp. 41 ff. DOI logo
Muñoz Pérez, Carlos
2018. Recognizing copies: On the definition of Non-Distinctiveness. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1 DOI logo

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