That-trace in German

In this paper we report an investigation into the that-trace effect, a phenomenon which, in part because it is poorly understood, has played a significant role in syntactic theory building in the generative tradition. In spite of this, the effect is standardly thought to be absent from German. Using the methodology of magnitude estimation of well-formedness, which permits the elicitation of judgement data with increased definition, we tested the German equivalents to the English structures in which the that-trace effect is uncontroversially present (e.g. Cowart, 1997). The results showed the effect to be robustly active in the grammar of German too, independent of matrix verb. We further tested for the same effect in topicalization structures, with positive results. We argue that these outcomes provide support for a model of grammaticality incorporating gradience, in which constraint violations are survivable, since constraint application and output selection are separate functions of linguistic processing.