Aaron at CLS

Which all facts about "alles"-stranding in German have a syntactic explanation?

May 6-7, Aaron Doliana is virtually at the annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, presenting a talk that ask "Why must wh-quantifiers in German strand with complex wh-phrases?"

Abstract

This talk establishes an empirical generalization about the German particle known as “invariant alles”. While alles can surface in one constituent with, or be stranded off of, its associated wh-phrase when it is simplex, alles must be stranded when its associate is a complex wh-phrase. It is shown that this complexity restriction is syntactic, and argued that, as a result, a prominent analysis of stranding is incompatible with alles.