To match or not to match? That’s the question. Some considerations on German free relative clauses

The aim of this contribution is to discuss some core aspects of free relative clauses, a classical theme of theoretical linguistics (Bhatt, 1998; Cinque, 2008, 2013, 2016, 2020; Pankau, 2018; Poletto & Sanfelici 2014, 2018, Sauerland, 2003; specifically on German: Mewe, 2020 a.o.), but on which no final word has been said. In particular, the question will be addressed to what extent in languages with overt case morphology such as German, case matching plays a role in blocking or allowing for potential conflicts between the null head and the overt wh-. Against this background, it will be investigated whether in a free relative clause case-matching but different thematic roles always give rise to felicitous results and conversely whether under case-mismatch but syncretic morphology the configuration can be rescued. Along these lines, it will be verified if Keenan & Comrie’s (1977) Accessibility Hierarchy and Caha’s (2009) Case Containment Hierarchy correctly predict the acceptability of some non-matching configurations. Finally, free relative clauses introduced by d- pronouns in German (Fuß & Grewendorf, 2014) will be also considered, since their syntactic behaviour does not fully overlap with that of regular wh-, giving rise to interesting restrictions, which can be found in other varieties such as Frisian and can help shed some further light on the role played by the introducer and possibly by animacy.