Long extraction in German: banned, but still alive

Long extraction, that is, the displacement of a constituent across a clause boundary, is considered a process of broad applicability. This view is challenged by the claim that extracting a phrase from a that-clause into a relative clause is ungrammatical in German. Since the evidence for this claim is extremely limited, we ran three acceptability experiments investigating long extraction in German. As expected from a large range of studies on long extraction in German, long extraction was judged as less acceptable than corresponding sentences without long extraction. Importantly, long extraction was equally acceptable across the three contexts that were tested—relative clauses, embedded questions and main clause questions. Our experiments, thus, show that long extraction applies across different structural contexts in German, as expected if long extraction is a general syntactic process. In addition, this paper presents new evidence concerning the sources of individual variation with regard to the acceptability of long extraction. First, we confirm that long extraction gets less acceptable when going from the South to the North of the German speaking area. Second, we tested whether individual participants differ with regard to how easily they accept non-standard constructions. To this end, we ran an additional experiment on verb-cluster formation, including sentences that are ungrammatical according to prescriptive grammar but that are, nevertheless, accepted by many speakers of German. The acceptability of long extraction correlates with the acceptability of non-standard verb clusters even when regional background is controlled for.