What pragmatics can do for wh-movement: Extractions from that-complements in German

Abstract

Constraints on wh-movement have long been a central issue for questions of locality in syntax and have a long research tradition in various paradigms and models. Defining domains which are transparent (or opaque) for long wh-movement - also known as extraction - is only one of the many topics which fall under the heading of movement restrictions. This paper is concerned with extractions from a particular domain, namely that-complement clauses in German, which provide a challenge to every syntactic theory as one and the same structural domain can be either transparent or opaque depending on the embedding matrix verb. The paper investigates what a semantic solution might look like and provides arguments for the assumption that a pragmatic principle is most suitable for an explanation.