Universals and grammaticality: wh-constraints in German and English

Abstract In this article we investigate the movement constraints superiority and discourse linking. These have played an important role in the tradition of generative syntax and might therefore be expected to be universal, but they are usually argued to be absent from German. We looked for evidence of them in German data using the methodology of magnitude estimation of wellformedness, and compared this data with parallel results from English. The results showed these effects to be robustly active in the grammar of German, and revealed few differences between the two languages. We suggest that the reason why linguists have denied their existence in German is that they have been assuming a binary and categorical concept of grammaticality, forgetting that this is merely a simplifying abstraction from the primary linguistic data. We demonstrate that the admittedly convenient assumption of categorical grammaticality is obscuring our view of the syntax, and that studies using our own more empirically adequate assumptions of grammaticality can be productive. In particular, we hope that our conceptions of constraint survivability and definition of syntax relevance may permit insights into the size of the grammar, crosslinguistic variation, and syntactic universals.