Antecedent priming at trace positions: Evidence from German scrambling

In Chomsky's theory of grammar, syntactic representations are said to conta in movement traces, i.e., syntactically active but phonetically null copies of displaced constituents Correspondingly, traces have been claimed to Son part of the processing of sentence structure by showing that at trace site s the parser reactivates a moved constituent. This view has been contested, however, by researchers arguing that experimental findings can better be e xplained in terms of direct associations between subcategorizers and argume nts. Against this background, we investigate antecedent reactivation effect s in scrambled double-object constructions of German in two cross-modal pri ming experiments. We found significant priming effects at positions at whic h a movement analysis of these constructions would postulate an empty categ ory, thus suggesting that the antecedent is indeed reactivated at the gap p osition. The Direct Association Hypothesis, on the other hand, cannot accou nt for the priming effects we found. Implications for processing and for sy ntactic analyses of scrambling in German will be discussed.