Parasitic gap patterns and hierarchy preservation in German

Abstract This paper discusses how German parasitic gap data from various earlier publications illustrate two patterns of systematic grammatical variation in the language, which have not been previously identified as such in the literature. I show how Heck and Himmelreich’s (Heck, Fabian & Anke Himmelreich. 2017. Opaque intervention. Linguistic Inquiry 48. 47–97) analysis for one pattern, although not able to currently capture both patterns, can be extended by allowing for variation in the positions targeted by scrambling along with the phrase markers that constitute domains for linearization. The resulting unifying analysis highlights how different grammatical mechanisms can in various ways (both local and global) have the effect of preserving the hierarchical relations involved in multiple movement dependencies.