Was-für experiment

In German was-für (or 'what for') constructions, the wh-element was ('what') can be subextracted out of the wh-phrase. Constraints on extractability have predominantly been described in syntactic or information-structural terms. Müller (2010) analyses subextraction out of a was-für phrase which is the subject of a transitive verb. He finds that extraction is unacceptable if the object stays in its base position and the subject is last-merged in vP. This configuration becomes transparent for extraction if the object is scrambled across the subject. We conducted a rating study which shows that the freezing configuration does indeed receive lower ratings than its melting counterpart. However, the results also demonstrate that suitable context manipulation reduces this difference in acceptability significantly. If the freezing vs. melting opposition were the consequence of syntactic principles only, both constructions should be affected by context manipulation in the same way.